Hoffman Gallery
April Gallery Exhibition
Exhibit-Thursdays–Sundays | April 3–26 | 12:00-5:00pm
Opening Reception April 5 | 3:00-5:00pm
Gallery is closed the last Sunday of every month
Hoffman Center for the Arts | 594 Laneda Avenue | Manzanita
Free and open to the public
Featuring Works by
Julie Johnson, Kirsten Blair, Anna Kaufman
Julie Johnson
About Julie
Julie is primarily a plant-based sculptural artist with a background in basketry, papermaking and natural dyes. Julie gathers almost all of her materials throughout the Pacific Northwest with her partner, Ben. Their respectful, sustainable harvests – from urban gardens and managed landscapes, to the wilds of forests, rivers and oceans – provide the raw materials for everything she makes. Working almost exclusively with these natural-world offerings, Julie creates sculptural objects.
The technical aspects of Julie’s practice are based in skills learned during decades of formal instruction and studio practice. She loves researching plants – including historic and traditional ethnobotanical uses in cultures all over the world. Combining materials and techniques in interesting ways is the result of endless studio experimentation.
Julie’s current work is inspired by movement and incorporates elements of myth, ritual and sound.
Kirsten Blair
About Kristen
Kirsten Blair is an artist living in Cape Meares, Oregon. Her work has been shown throughout Portland since 2009.
Kirsten’s work is an expression of presence. It aims to recreate the shapes and repetition found while exploring her home on the Oregon Coast. Through immersion in nature and observation, her work explores the concept of space, rest and sense of place through abstraction. Her work is a connection back to those moments of presence and place.
These paintings are a story of discovery. The search for subject, materials and self all in one place. A place that brought Kirsten home both physically and mentally. Brought her back to herself. The Oregon Coast.
The subject is an abstraction of found eelgrass compositions on the beach. Now, Kirsten is further from that moment of discovery, but she can relive the somatic memories with each painting. The foundation of linen is dyed with plant material she’s foraged along that same beach and slowly coaxed the color from them over her kitchen stove. They gave a delicate and rich palette of oranges, pinks and yellows. Adding things like baking soda or iron shift the color to the colors you see in the collection.
The process of collecting, dying and sewing is slow and deeply connects Kirsten to the work beyond abstract visual expression.
Anna Kaufman
This body of work, Memoriam, expands on a series of portraits about the residents of Peehee Mu’huh (Thacker Pass), Nevada.
Currently, Peehee Mu’huh is being excavated and will become the largest open pit lithium mine in North America. The silvery white element is a primary ingredient in the batteries needed to electrify the world. A transition away from fossil fuels is, on the surface, a noble and necessary effort. But digging deeper, one would find the highly extractive processes required to obtain lithium are not as “clean” as is advertised.
This delicate high desert sagebrush steppe ecosystem has been home to many unique creatures for millennia. It is the ancestral homeland of the Shoshone-Paiute people, serving as a hunting and burial ground, obsidian collection site, and a corridor for travel. Two massacres of the Shoshone-Paiute people have occurred here and are remembered by this landscape.
Memoriam has evolved from traditional scientific illustration to decorative mosaic portraits using acrylic paint pens on canvas and paper. Most recently, these portraits employ memory and imagination, rather than live or photo references. Memory is a means to talk about absence and what lives on inside of us. The disruption of the landscape and the erasure of uniquely adapted cultures of Peehee Mu’huh are explored through negative space.
Memoriam invites you to reflect on the rapidly developing and changing world and to grieve the losses underway. It also is an invitation to celebrate the many colorful, animated residents of Peehee Mu’huh.
About Anna
Artist and environmentalist Anna Kaufman grew up in Los Angeles. As an only child, a shy child, she quickly found magic and solace in drawing and painting. Artmaking offered a new way of seeing, studying, feeling — a type of language.
In 2022, Kaufman graduated from Vassar College in upstate New York with a degree in environmental studies and concentrations in earth science and visual arts. There, Kaufman received the Environmental Studies H. Dan Peck Prize for her thesis research and art installation about clearcutting in Clatsop County.
Kaufman’s passions as an environmentalist and as an artist greatly inform one another. Their intersection bridges modern western science with an intuitive, reflective, and ancient form of communication. As we see intensifying environmental crises in the era of anthropogenic climate change, Kaufman explores art as a means of information sharing, connection, and empowerment.
Since graduating, Kaufman was selected as artist in residence at Astoria Visual Arts and the recipient of the Agnes Field Award. She now lives in Astoria, Oregon, where she is the chapter coordinator for North Coast Communities for Watershed Protection (NCCWP), a grassroots citizen group that calls for the end of logging, pesticide spraying, and slash burning within drinking watersheds.
To connect with and learn more about Anna Kaufman’s work, please click here to visit her website
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April 3, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 4, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 5, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 6, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 10, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 11, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 12, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 13, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 17, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 18, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 19, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 20, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 24, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 25, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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April 26, 2025
12:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Address:
594 Laneda Avenue, Manzanita, Oregon, 97130
Description:
Situated on the main street in Manzanita just a few blocks west of Highway 101, the Hoffman Center Art Gallery is located across the street from the North Tillamook Library.
