July 16 – September 15, 2020
Mel Katz’s father worked as a tailor in New York City’s garment industry. This seemingly small bit of biography illuminates the shapes in Katz’s current exhibition, Wall Sculptures, on view in OJMCHE’s north windows. Look closely and you will see traces of tailoring patterns in the rigorous lines of his work. The thread of his long artistic evolution is now pieced into his sculptures. Trained first as a painter, Mel Katz decided to become a sculptor. The materials he uses have changed from paint to plastic to wood to steel. He first creates full scale drawings of overlapping and interlocking arrangements. Drawings are traced and programmed to be water-jet cut from aluminum materials. The five anodized aluminum sculptures, created between 2012 and 2019, combine bold colors and abstract architectural shapes to evoke Oregonian flora and landscape. The exhilarating result highlights Katz’s confidence that artwork reveals an evolutionary understanding of what art is and how it should be crafted.
Mel Katz (b.1932) grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. After studying at Cooper Union and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, he moved to Portland in 1964 as a visiting professor at the Museum Art School (now Pacific Northwest College of Art). Two years later Katz moved to Portland State University, where he taught for the next 30 years. By the early 1970s, he became celebrated as one of the founders of the Portland Center for the Visual Arts. Since 1956 Katz’s work has been frequently exhibited, including major retrospectives at the Hallie Ford Museum, in Salem in 2006 and 2015, Portland Art Museum in 1988, Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington in 2017-2018, and the highly acclaimed traveling exhibition Still Working, in 1994. In 2017, he was one of 13 artists featured in OJMCHE’s exhibition, I Am This, Art By Oregon Jewish Artists. Selected collections include the Portland Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; City of Seattle; Oregon Health Sciences University; Good Samaritan Hospital; and Safeco Insurance, Seattle. Mel Katz is represented by Russo Lee Gallery.
Artwork courtesy of the artist and Russo Lee Gallery. Wall Sculptures has been funded by a grant through the Oregon Arts and Culture Recovery Fund.