The Galleries are OPEN! Visit us 10-4 PM Tue-Fri and 12-4 PM Saturdays.
In the Lorenzen Gallery January 17-February 28, 2025: Life Drawing
In the East Oregonian Gallery:
HOLDING PATTERNS: The Art of Louise Abrams
January 17-February 28, 2025:
Born in 1941, Lousie Abrams’ interest in art led her to a diverse array of formal art experiences. She studied at New York’s Art Students League and the New School. Abrams went on to receive her BA and do graduate work at CUNY. She also briefly took classes abroad in Mexico at the Instituto Allende. (1) She began building her resume as a professional artist in the mid-1970s with a number of exhibitions at established New York City art venues, including the Cloud Gallery. She was also a featured artist at Soho’s Pleiades Gallery (established in 1974 and still in operation today). (2)
Following this flurry of activity, going into the 80’s there is no record of any further organized exhibition activity. The scant biographical information available suggests Abrams art career was unfortunately curtailed as the result of increasing mental health issues. The challenges she faced were profound enough that Abrams spent years of her adult life in residential mental health facilities. While she stopped exhibiting, however, she never stopped creating. Over a span of thirty-plus years, Abrams created thousands of paintings, she filled sketchbooks with ink and graphite drawings, and completed many small carvings. (3)
Walla Walla Wa collector, curator, and artist, Daniel Forbes, discovered Abrams work in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown. He came across her paintings perusing online auction sites – something he’d taken up as a distraction from the covid crisis. Initially arrested by Abrams’ canvases with their bold palettes and obsessive patterning, when Forbes learned Abrams’ history, her compositions, populated with uncanny figures (perhaps) pulled from her interior worlds captured his interest even more.
Forbes had spent most of his own life navigating difficult physical and mental health challenges. When things were at their most severe, he found relief in meditative and sometimes obsessive mark-making, lines and dots, in particular. He’d long credited his intuitive-creative practice enabled his survival and studying Abrams’ work, he felt a sort of kinship.
Upon further research, it turned out Abrams’ finished pieces had been accumulating in a storage unit she and her partner were no longer able to sustain. As a result, almost the entire body of her work was up for auction. Forbes attended the first online auction of Abrams’ work out of curiosity, but when the sale started, and lots of four to six paintings began to sell for small amounts, he jumped in and began bidding. Though in successive auctions, Forbes was eventually priced out of bidding, within the first few auctions of Abram’s catalog, he managed to build a collection of over 100 works. (He added to this in 2024 with the acquisition of a second collection of Abram’s pieces purchased from another collector.
As the current steward of this body of Louise Abrams’ work, Forbes desires to share her visionary art with as many people as possible. In part because he believes Abrams’ work merits recognition. Additionally, however, he believes her pieces, and the sharing of his own experience create a space in museums and galleries for generative conversations about mental health and the sustaining power of art-making.
- https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/92795823_painting-louise-abrams-outsider-art-collection-oil
- https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/92795823_painting-louise-abrams-outsider-art-collection-oil
- https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/92795823_painting-louise-abrams-outsider-art-collection-oil