Depth of Field

Collector/Donor Bill Rhoades has been finding and donating art work to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem since its inception in 1998. In recent years he has focused (no pun intended) on photographs made by photographers from the Northwest or with a Northwest connection. This late winter/spring (until April 23rd) you have a chance to see this work which is extraordinary. Familiar, detailed, delightful, pensive…our place in the world.

Today we had the good fortune to meet Bill and his partner Coralee at the museum to look at the exhibit, beautifully curated by Jonathan Bucci and sensitively installed by Silas Cook.

It was major fun to hear the stories unfold as Bill and Coralee made their way around the exhibition…

Here Coralee remembered the day photographer Terry Toedtemeier took them on an excursion into a cave, as they looked at this beautiful image used for the front of the exhibition brochure (available at the Museum…with a nice essay by Roger Hull).

The images are varied and numerous with the thread of place running throughout the exhibition (located on the second floor in the Study Gallery and the Print Study Center…)

All of the donations from Bill are made in memory of his parents Murna and Vay Rhoades, and I appreciated seeing this snapshot of them in the display case…putting faces to the names…

I really hope you take this opportunity to visit the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, and while you are upstairs, there are many things on loan including this wonderful Ad Reinhart from 1950 and, my personal favorite this little Alice Neel watercolor of the Harlem River in 1927…very wittily hung next to a Corot. Go, no kidding.