There’s major news coming down from the Portland Art Museum today: It was announced at a press conference that the Oregon Biennial as we know it is kaput, and will be replaced with the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards next year.

Rather than highlighting work solely from Oregon and Vancouver, WA, the new exhibition series will show work from the “greater Northwest,” which they define as “Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.” Why they drew the line at not including Vancouver, BC is beyond me.

The museum promises to “support and exhibit both promising and under-recognized professional artists of the region by presenting their work in depth in an exhibition where each artist is honored with an award, one of whom will receive the distinguished Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the amount of $10,000.” By promising and under-recognized artists, we can presume that the old stand-bys (G. Lewis Clevenger, Storm Tharp, et. al) will have to watch from the sidelines, and fresher talents emerge.

The selection processed has changed, too, which is seriously overdue in coming. “The Museum will invite a select group of respected arts professionals, including regional curators, scholars, dealers, writers, artists, and critics, to nominate visual artists based on the quality of their work…” blah blah blah. This will provide such a deeper range of artists to curate from, rather than picking from a bunch of mailed in slides. PAM curators have complained to me in the past that many of their favorite artsits didn’t submit work, were therefore ineligible to be in the show—a situation which will now be avoided.

On one hand, I hate to see the show lose its Portland focus, but everything else sounds so much better to me. Choosing a smaller number of artists and really showing their work (rather than one or two or three pieces) is a great idea, and the broader regional context will help solidify Portland as a serious player in this part of the country. This all depends on the quality of the work and the presentation at the CNAA (can we get a new catalogue design, too?), which is something we’ll have to wait until June 2008 to discover.

painting by James Lavadour