The Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner is 35 years old and MoNA’s current exhibition celebrates the anniversary.
Originally the dream of the late Northwest photographer Art Hupy, the museum began in 1981 as the Valley Museum of Northwest Art, with a focus on the well-known Northwest artists Morris Graves and Edmonds’ Guy Anderson, who had lived in Skagit County, and their compatriots, Mark Tobey and Kenneth Callahan.
Life, a popular national magazine not known for chronicling art or even the Pacific Northwest, featured Anderson, Graves, Callahan and Tobey in a color spread in 1953, bestowing on them the name “Mystic Painters of the Northwest” and called their work the “Northwest School.”
The 35th anniversary show includes works by these “big four” as well as other Skagit Valley artists including Skagit-native Richard Gilkey, Clayton James, Barbara Straker James, Bill Slater, John Simon, Lilli Mathews, Paul Havas and Larry Heald.
Also included are regional artists Alden Mason (of Everett), Mary Randlett, Windsor Utley, Helmi Juvonen, Neil Meitzler, Doris Chase, Wes Wehr, Ambrose and Viola Patterson and William Cumming.
Perhaps the two most striking pieces in the exhibition are Cumming’s 1941 mural on canvas, discovered two years ago at the Skagit County Fair, and Heald’s huge realistic panoramic acrylic painting from the late 1980s titled “In the Rockies.”
The Cumming mural, which depicts work on a dairy farm, allows the viewer “to relate the history of the Depression-era New Deal programs that supported artists across the country, and to show how it impacted artists in our own region,” said MoNA curator Kathleen Moles. The mural is one of four such large-scale paintings surviving in Skagit County that document industry and work in the early 20th century.
The Heald piece is 16 panels joined together to represent, from left to right, the rainy west side of the Rocky Mountains, the snowy peaks of the north, the view to the plains in the east and the red rocks of the south. He painted four at a time, using the fourth of the previous set as a guide for the next set of four.
Heald, now 75, is dealing with some memory issues, so his wife, Dana, a docent at MoNA, offered some background on the painting, which stretches 58 feet side-to-side, taking up an entire wall at the museum.
A photograph of the couple’s young daughter Sierra providing a base coat on one of the panels is displayed adjacent to the piece. Sierra is now 31.
“Most artists work on several pieces at once, but when Larry began working on this he was totally focused,” Dana Heald said. “It was first displayed in Eureka, California, in 1989. We hadn’t seen it since then, so when Larry visited MoNA recently to see ‘In the Rockies’ he got the biggest grin on his face. He hadn’t remembered it being so fabulous.”
The only sign of humans in the painting is a camp fire in panel No. 6, Dana said.
“Each quadrant could stand on its own, but it is great to see them all together.”
The exhibit is displayed through Sept. 11.
If you go
Museum of Northwest Art
Noon to 5 p.m. Sunday and Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 121 S. First St., La Conner; 360-466-4446; www.monamuseum.org. Free admission.
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