Art Talk: Erik Sandgren and Hobe Kytr
Erik Sandgren, one of the title artists in current exhibition The Columbia River: Wallula to the Sea featuring works by Thomas Jefferson Kitts and Erik Sandgren, will talk about the body of work that he created for the exhibition. He will be joined by Hobe Kytr, a folklorist, songwriter, and musician who specializes in songs about the history and folklore of Northwest regional life.
About the Speakers
Erik Sandgren has long been associated with the culture of visual arts in the Northwest: mountains, trees and water, skies and people have inspired his feeling for location, myth and history. Probing the Northwest landscape with sensitivity to myth and origins, Sandgren’s landscapes evoke the Northwest intertwine: community in the context of nature. His large scale public projects include murals in the Montesano and Aberdeen, Washington Public Libraries, the Port of Grays Harbor Centennial Mural Project, Nirvana in Aberdeen and the 4600 square feet Eugene/Springfield Airport Concourse Project on which he assisted his father. Having been tenured as a one-person art department of Grays Harbor College he has returned to Oregon to and live work full-time.
His father, Nelson Sandgren, was a noted painter and OSU Art professor. Their Corvallis household was saturated with the art and artists that fostered Erik’s early interests and education as a painter. He went east to study on the broad path of a liberal arts education at Yale (BA 1975) and flourished there in the practice and theory of visual art under the mentorships of Erwin Hauer, Bernard Chaet and Gretna Campbell. He focused his commitment to painting and printmaking at Cornell University (MFA 1977).
In 1989, Sandgren returned like a homing salmon, to the headwaters of his art and early life in the Pacific Northwest. He taught from 1989 through 2017 as a one-person art department at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, WA. Sabbaticals and a Fulbright Teaching Exchange to England enabled Sandgren to explore Europe’s deeply settled landscapes and acquire firsthand experience of Western art history and architecture. This and other travels informed his commitment to the Foundations Program and his own work.
Erik is widely represented in private and public collections including the University of Oregon Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Maryhill Museum, Portland State University, Museum of Oregon Territory, University of Portland, Oregon State University, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art of Willamette University, the Franklin Furnace Gallery of the Museum of Modern Art, Yale University Art Gallery and the China National Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou.
Hobe Kytr has more than 40 years of experience as a historian of the lower Columbia River. Also a folklorist, songwriter and musician, he has worked to identify and reanimate songs about the history and folklore of Northwest regional life, especially that of fishermen and loggers, in archival texts and other discovered sources.
Hobe Kytr led Salmon For All, a commercial fishing advocacy group dedicated to providing protection and conservation for Columbia River salmon resources, while also providing consumer access to high quality seafood. Prior to that, he was the Director of the Ilwaco Heritage Museum and Education Coordinator at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria. He also was a board member of the Pacific County Friends of Lewis & Clark and served on the Pacific County Lodging Tax Advisory Committee. In addition to performing regional Oregon folk songs, Hobe frequently plays the banjo for Astoria-area contra dances and square dances. He was also one of the founding members of the annual FisherPoets Gathering, where he performs each year and gives songwriting workshops. He is a graduate of Reed College in Portland.