Although August is a great month to spend time outdoors, the University of Oregon Museum of Art is giving the community a reason to take in an pleasant indoor activity.
The “Summer Celebration of Northwest Art” exhibit is halfway through its viewing period, so now is the time to enjoy the rich culture the UOMA has to offer in its last summer before renovation.
The “Summer Celebration” is comprised of two exhibits: “Heritage of Northwest Art: The Virginia Haseltine Collection” and “Community Favorites from the David McCosh Collection.” The exhibit opened on June 30 and will run through Sept 3.
“Northwest art is a very exciting part of modern art,” Diane Lang Brissenden said. Lang Brissenden has served as a docent at the museum for the last two years, where she has been learning about the Haseltine Collection. “The Northwest side is a very good example of the most famous and talented Northwest artists.”
The “Heritage of Northwest Art” collection is a selection of works representing 20 years of effort by Haseltine collecting paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures from Northwest artists. The collection also features functional, sculptural and experimental works of ceramists, as well as portraits of the artists to offer further insight for the community.
“It’s a collection that’s not often seen,” said Lawrence Fong, the UOMA curator for Northwest art. “It represents American artists through the 20th century and some of those are very prominent artists.”
A program to assemble a collection of Northwest art was developed in the early 1960s by Haseltine and Dr. Baldinger, the UOMA’s director at the time. While consulting with museum directors and curators from the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum and the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery, Haseltine traveled extensively to meet with artists and gallery dealers.
Haseltine’s primary donation of artworks for the collection included 63 works and was first exhibited in 1963. Since then, the collection has grown to more than 350 pieces. Along with donating the collection to the UOMA, Haseltine established an endowment that would allow the museum to care for the artwork and to acquire new work to supplement the present collection.
“Haseltine thought it was important for universities to be able to study works by artists of a national stature and to support the livelihood of artists in Oregon,” Fong said. ” I thought it was important to show this collection … and to remind people how art museums develop collections through the generosity of patrons. There are some textbook artists in this exhibit.”
The second exhibit is the “Community Favorites from the David McCosh Collection.” McCosh came to the University in 1934 as a professor of painting and printmaking at the School of Architecture and Allied Arts.
His early career encompassed exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. McCosh was also commissioned to paint murals by the Department for the Interior in Washington, D.C.

McCosh passed away in 1981 and his wife, Anne Kutka McCosh established the David J. McCosh Memorial Collection in 1990. The collection of more than 1,700 pieces includes sketchbooks, watercolors, lectures, notes and correspondence.
“McCosh has this huge body of work at the museum,” said Mark Clarke, a Eugene-based painter who has had numerous exhibits throughout Oregon and the Midwest. “He produced an enormous amount of work and taught what he was experiencing in that painting.”
The collection is comprised of 29 paintings from the McCosh Memorial Collection, and each individual painting was selected for display by a member of the community. It is the first of a series of four selections of work from the Memorial Collection.
“The director asked me if I’d care to serve as commentator [on the selection of artwork] and based on my long acquaintance with David McCosh, I thought it was a nice opportunity,” Mark Sponenburgh said.
Sponenburgh, a resident of Seal Rock, is one of the most prominent sculptors in Oregon. He served with McCosh during his 10-year tenure at the University as a professor of art history and fine arts.
“David was my best source for inspiration and information,” said Sponenburgh. “That apprenticeship lasted till long after I left the UO.”
When making the selections for the exhibit, Sponenburgh said he was “interested in the chronology [of McCosh’s work] and I knew McCosh well enough to know how he developed. I selected the ones that struck me as representing nuances of his creative repertory.”
One of Sponenburgh’s selections for the exhibit was McCosh’s “Bridger Range II,” a 1947 painting of mountains in Montana.
“The series McCosh painted during that summer in Montana was very strongly responding to the power of the Rocky Mountains,” Sponenburgh said. “‘Bridger Range II’ comes close to structural cubism. McCosh was exploring aspects of cubism that depicted the western landscapes.”
“The UOMA has a very fine exhibition director, so I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibit,” Sponenburgh said. “I would like to see it all on the wall, up and presented in such a manner to be tasteful and informative.”
Sponenburgh was not the only member of the selection committee whose life and artwork was touched by McCosh.
“I was a student of his for over two years in the Masters of Fine Arts program,” Clarke said. He studied under McCosh’s before serving as the UOMA’s curator of exhibitions.
“He was a tough teacher and expected you to work very hard,” he said. “He had an awful lot of information to share if you were interested. McCosh had changed his approach to painting sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s. When I studied under him, he had a fresh direction he was very excited about.”
In 1963, McCosh recommended Clarke to the museum’s director to work as a curator, and he filled the position for 12 years.

“Painting is a hobby gone crazy,” Clarke said. “I think of Dave McCosh every day because I paint every day. I just got more information from him then I could possibly use at the time, but it lingers on throughout my life.
“When you have instructors like McCosh, he just becomes part of your heart, your soul.”
The museum is open from noon to 8 p.m. Wednesday and from noon to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. Suggested admission is $3 except on Wednesday evenings when the MusEvenings! program offers free extended viewing hours from 5 to 8 p.m. Museum members, students, University employees, and children are admitted free.
For more information visit the museum’s Web site at http://uoma.uoregon.edu or call (541) 346-3027.