Rick Bartow, 'What the Spirit Knows'

Over the past decade, works by contemporary Native American artists have garnered a level of visibility rarely, if ever, experienced. Jeffrey Gibson at the American Pavilion in the last Venice Biennale, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art two year before her death in 2025, and numerous gallery selections at the 2023 Armory Show are just a few of the recent honors afforded them. And so, on the one hand, it’s not surprising that this is the first solo exhibition of Rick Bartow’s work in the U.K. Long considered one of the finest Native American artists of the Pacific Northwest, Bartow is gaining an increasingly international reputation that will forever change how we think about indigenous art and the power of art to heal ourselves and our world.

An enrolled member of the northern California Wiyot Tribe, Richard Elmer “Rick” Bartow (1946-2016) was born in Newport, Oregon, to a white mother and native father. A professionally trained artist, Bartow received his B.A. in secondary art education in 1969 from Western Oregon State University in Monmouth. He was also an accomplished musician, regularly playing and recording the original music he wrote with his band, The Backseat Drivers, in the Newport, Oregon, area.

If as Oscar Wilde wrote, all art is self-portrait, then Rick’s art practice was a constant exercise in exploring his hybrid identity. He blended Western art historical influences with native cosmologies, often referencing the work of Albrecht Dürer, Frances Bacon, and Egon Schiele, among others, as well as such movements as the Blue Rider group, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. His visits to Japan, Mexico, and New Zealand gave him a deep appreciation for diverse cultural practices, anchored in an understanding that the human and spirit realms were inextricably connected.

Bartow’s music and “mark-making,” as he often called it, were his therapy. They were creative and intuitive practices through which he faced, accepted, and overcame the many tragedies and traumas he experienced, including an alcoholic father who died when he was five; PTSD from his experiences in Vietnam; alcoholism; and the death of his beloved wife, Julie, from breast cancer.  He was unflinching in his commitment to authentic emotive aesthetic expression.

Following his return to Newport from Vietnam, Bartow’s mentorship by a local Siletz elder and participation in the tribe’s community helped him overcome addiction and connected him with nature and indigenous perspectives and stories, all of which permeate his work. He, too, became an elder, and ceremony, especially through dance and music, became central to his artistic vocabulary as well as to his being in the world. During his 1996 trip to New Zealand for an exhibition of his work, he was given a box of Arapaho, Flat Head, and Sioux remains. With members of a local Maori tribe, he cleaned the bones and led a healing ritual, before returning with them to the States for burial. Discovering as an adult that he was, in fact, a Wiyot, impelled him to learn about the tribe and its massacre in 1860.  He made art in response to it and took part in the 2014 restored World Renewal Ceremony on Tuluwat Island, California, healing the people and the place of the massacre.

Rick was prolific and versatile. He was a master draftsman and a vibrant colorist. He worked in oil, and acrylic, pastel, charcoal, and pencil, in a range of print media, and in wood and bronze. This exhibition primarily explores one of his favored mixed media, pastel and graphite, in works from the 1980s and ‘90s.  The majority are self-portraits, whose stances and direct confrontation convey humor and pathos, humility and boldness. The Heart Knows the Direction Home/For James Schopert offers a memorial to a former teacher and Inuit artist who died in 1982. He Sings With Their Voices dissolves boundaries, allowing a practitioner of native ceremonies to become a conduit of spirit and community.

For Bartow, the indigenous world view was a lived reality in which animals were fellow creatures, guides, and symbols, and meaning came from respecting the Earth and all its inhabitants and habitats. The permeability of physical identity allowed him to manifest the qualities of bears, crows, coyotes, deer, dogs, and other animals within and outside of the human forms in his compositions.

Unusual among the human-animal compositions are two works featuring boats. The boat is often a symbol for the transition from life to death, or the transition to the other shore, a Buddhist metaphor. It seems appropriate here. For Bartow, the boat may well reference the death in 1990 of his uncle, Robert Bartow, his father’s twin and his own substitute father, who fished along the Newport coast. The title About Japan (Wayima I), from the same year, may connect the two fishing villages, which share the same ocean.

In 2013, he suffered a stroke that slowed his verbal expression, but through intensive mark-making he was able to paint and draw again and on April 2, 2016, Bartow died from congestive heart failure.

Bartow’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and commissions and is included in more than one hundred major museum collections, primarily in the United States.

Jill Hartz