Black Door with Red, 1954, Georgia O’Keeffe. © The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York
Hello, my friend,
I have been thinking about peace this week.
Not the absence of feeling.
Not quiet for its own sake.
Something deeper.
Perhaps peace is what happens when we understand where we are, what matters, and what is ours to care for.
I have felt that while preparing Before the Water Rose: Celilo Falls, 1956, the exhibition of Richard Stefani’s photographs opening later this month.
The work has required research, restoration, writing, editing, and many decisions about how the photographs should be seen and understood.
But beneath all of that is something quieter.
Stewardship.
Caring for something another person made well enough that it can continue speaking after they are gone.
People have been sharing their memories of Richard with me as the exhibition approaches. They remember the photographer, certainly. But they also remember the man: his warmth, his humor, his kindness.
There is a particular kind of peace in discovering that someone you loved has been carried forward in other people’s memories too.
At the same time, I started four new paintings this week.
Before beginning, I mapped the colors, strategy, and glazing passes by hand on notebook paper, as I usually do.
It grounds me.
A plan does not remove uncertainty from painting. Nor would I want it to.
It simply gives me somewhere to begin.
Perhaps peace is not always found by doing less.
Sometimes it comes from knowing where to begin.
The Places That Shape an Artist
A new exhibition opening this week at the Detroit Institute of Arts looks at a side of Georgia O’Keeffe that is surprisingly easy to overlook.
Georgia O’Keeffe: Architecture brings together almost 40 works exploring the buildings she observed throughout her life, from Manhattan skyscrapers and rural barns to the adobe structures of New Mexico.
We know O’Keeffe through flowers, bones, and expansive desert landscapes.
But she looked closely at buildings too.
The exhibition follows several decades of that interest and reveals architecture not simply as background, but as another way O’Keeffe studied line, geometry, color, and place.
I am particularly interested in the idea that the places surrounding an artist inevitably become part of the work.
A studio.
A house.
A city.
A landscape.
The spaces we inhabit teach us what to notice.
And perhaps, over enough time, they begin shaping the way we see.
British artist and designer ES Devlin, 2026 Homo Faber artistic director. Courtesy Homo Faber.
An Island of Light
In Venice, another exhibition is considering what happens when skill passes through the human hand.
Homo Faber 2026: An Island of Light is now underway at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.
More than 500 artisans from over 70 countries are represented through some 700 handcrafted objects, arranged across 15 installations under the artistic direction of Es Devlin. At the center of the exhibition is the relationship between light, materials, and the hands that shape them.
But what interests me most is that the making itself has not been hidden.
Visitors can watch craftspeople work: carving ebony, practicing leather marquetry, weaving natural fibers, folding paper flowers, repairing with kintsugi, and demonstrating techniques whose knowledge may have accumulated across generations.
There is something profoundly reassuring about mastery.
Not perfection.
Mastery.
The quiet confidence that comes from knowing a material deeply enough to work with it rather than against it.
Wood.
Glass.
Clay.
Textile.
Paper.
Paint.
The material always has something to say.
Good craftsmanship begins by listening.
A Life in Stewardship
Closer to home, a remarkable chapter in Oregon’s cultural life has just come to an end.
John Olbrantz retired last week after 28 years as director of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University.
His retirement also marks exactly 50 years in museum leadership on the West Coast.
During his years at Hallie Ford, the museum’s permanent collection grew to more than 12,500 objects, while its exhibition, publishing, and educational programs helped establish it as an important center for Northwest art and scholarship.
John is also a friend of our gallery, which makes it especially meaningful for me to recognize his career here.
Institutions do not become important simply because someone declares them so.
They become important because people care for them over time.
They build collections.
Support scholarship.
Develop relationships.
Make difficult decisions.
Create standards.
Invite people in.
And then, eventually, they entrust what they have built to someone else.
That, too, is stewardship.
Congratulations, John, on an extraordinary career.
Bellagio Hotel Mural Still Life With Reclining Nude (study), Roy Lichtenstein, 1997. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art
Still Becoming
At the Whitney Museum in New York, a small exhibition offers another kind of perspective on a long creative life.
Roy Lichtenstein: 1997 focuses entirely on the final year of the artist’s career.
The works are not simply repetitions of the visual language that made him famous decades earlier.
The exhibition includes prints, photographs, sculptural maquettes, drawings, collages, and studies for projects he never completed. The Whitney describes an artist still experimenting with new ideas and responding to the emergence of the digital age five decades into his career.
I find that deeply encouraging.
There is a temptation to imagine mastery as arrival.
Perhaps it is nothing of the kind.
Perhaps an artist can know what she is doing and still remain curious.
Still alter a palette.
Still try a different surface.
Still begin again.
Experience does not have to close possibility.
It can give us the confidence to enter it.
From the Studio
The four paintings I began this week are smaller than the recent series, each 28 by 22 inches.
Their titles came before they were finished:
Held by the Sky
Pouring the Ocean to Earth
The Edge of Heaven
Your Word on My Heart
I will be painting them in the gallery during open hours.
There is something I like about that.
A gallery usually presents the resolved object.
The painting has been finished, varnished, framed, titled, hung.
But making is far less orderly.
Things appear.
Disappear.
Move.
Fail.
Resolve.
A visitor may see a painting one afternoon and return days later to find that what they remembered is gone beneath another layer.
I think there is value in seeing that too.
Beauty is not always immediate.
Sometimes it is constructed slowly.
Pass after pass.
Decision after decision.
Until the work becomes itself.
From the Gallery
Later this month, we will open Before the Water Rose: Celilo Falls, 1956, presenting Richard Stefani’s photographs of Celilo Falls made only months before the falls were submerged beneath the reservoir created by The Dalles Dam.
Richard was twenty-three years old when he made them.
Nearly seventy years later, I have the privilege of caring for them.
The exhibition opens Saturday, September 26, from 6–8 pm at Stefani Art Gallery in Salem.
If you are nearby, I would be honored to have you join us.
What I’m Carrying With Me This Week
Peace is not emptiness.
Perhaps it is not even stillness.
Georgia O’Keeffe kept looking at the places around her.
Hundreds of artisans in Venice are keeping knowledge alive through their hands.
John Olbrantz spent decades caring for an institution before placing it into another person’s care.
Roy Lichtenstein was still experimenting in the final year of his life.
Richard’s photographs are being seen again.
And four blank canvases in my studio are becoming something they were not a week ago.
None of this feels still.
Yet somehow, all of it feels peaceful.
Perhaps peace does not require life to stop moving.
Perhaps it is simply the quiet assurance that some things are worth tending.
A work.
A place.
A craft.
A memory.
A life.
And then, when the time comes,
the courage to continue.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Christina
Christina Stefani
Founder, House of Stefani