Opening Reception: Louise Bourgeois @ Pendleton Center for the Arts

The Pendleton Center for the Arts is proud to present work by one of the most important artists of the 20th Century in the East Oregonian Gallery. Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was a French-American artist whose work explores themes of childhood, domesticity, family, gender roles and sexuality, While her room-sized spider sculptures are probably the most recognizable works of her long career, she was an accomplished printmaker whose works on paper were created over a span of 70 years. The images selected from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation provide an important overview of her work. Thanks to generous support from Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, admission to this exhibit is free for all ages. 

Her work has been exhibited in every major modern art museum in the world. In March, the Pendleton Center for the Arts in Pendleton, Oregon will be added to that list, allowing the 17,000 residents of the small rural town a first-hand experience with prints by the contemporary master. 

The exhibit opens Friday, March 16th with an Opening Reception for the general public from 6:00 – 7:30 PM and runs through May 5th. 

Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was born in Paris on Christmas Day. As a young girl she worked in her family’s busy tapestry restoration studio. She began making prints in the late 1930s, around the time she emigrated to New York, buying her own small press. When she turned to sculpture later in the 1940s, Bourgeois abandoned printmaking, taking it up again only in the late 1980s, when it then became integral to her work. Her work explores a fascination with textiles, architecture, spiders, and the body. She also used her art to tell the stories of her childhood, including difficult subjects like the First World War, her mother’s illness, and her parents’ troubled marriage. The Museum of Modern Art in New York recently presented a major exhibit of her work and maintains educational resources on her life and work at https://www.moma.org/artists/710?locale=en. 

Check out some great videos about her work at the Museum of Modern Arts' website: https://www.moma.org/ calendar/exhibitions/3661

The images selected from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation provide an important overview of her work. Thanks to generous support from Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, admission to this exhibit is free for all ages.