BOISE, ID.- James Lavadour: Land of Origin is a career retrospective that surveys five decades of artwork by self-trained painter and printmaker James Lavadour (American, Walla Walla, b. 1951, Cayuse, OR). The paintings, prints, and multi-panel grids chart his creative output from the 1980s, when he became a full-time working artist, to his most recent artworks, created in 2025. His artistic practice is grounded in sustained looking, informed by walking, driving, stopping, and observing the landscape over the course of many decades, specifically the land of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, outside Pendleton, Oregon. Lavadour typically works on as many as fifty panels simultaneously, composing selections into harmonious multi-panel grids. Through brushing, pouring, scraping, and dripping oil paint, he enacts a physical transformation akin to natural phenomena and shifting geological forces – a transfiguration of energy from one state into another. His works are not narratives or symbols but physical responses to place, shaped by the paint’s movement and the body’s memory. Skulls, bones, and anthropomorphic rock forms invite interpretation but resist fixed meaning. “The land looks like flesh,” Lavadour explains, emphasizing perception over story. Influenced by poetry, jazz, and global painting traditions, he rejects strict art historical labels. For Lavadour, painting reveals reality itself – an event in which land, material, and human presence converge.





James Lavadour: Land of Origin was organized by Danielle Knapp, McCosh Curator and curator of American and regional art at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) at the University of Oregon, located on Kalapuya Ilihi, the traditional Indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. JSMA gratefully acknowledges that the exhibition, its catalogue, and related programs are made possible with the generous support of The Ford Family Foundation in Oregon, the Coeta and Donald Barker Changing Exhibitions Endowment at the museum, the JSMA’s Hartz FUNd for Contemporary Art, and the JSMA Patron Circle and museum members. The exhibition’s national tour is supported and organized by Art Bridges, in partnership with the JSMA.

James Lavadour: Land of Origin was organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene. James Lavadour: Land of Origin was curated by Danielle M. Knapp, McCosh Curator, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon.