Taking a Pulse

On the eve of the Prichard Gallery’s 25th anniversary, its director muses about why we need more art in our lives.

The University of Idaho’s premier art gallery isn’t on campus at all; it’s in the middle of downtown Moscow, in a building that once housed a Radio Shack. An outreach facility of the College of Art and Architecture, the Prichard Art Gallery connects both arts faculty and the ever-changing student population with Moscow and its surrounding communities.

“The gallery has managed some exceptional quality despite relatively modest resources,” gallery director Roger Rowley says.

The Inlander caught up with Rowley as he prepares for the first exhibition in a year-long celebration to honor the gallery’s 25-year history.

INLANDER: You moved to Moscow in 2001, worked at Washington State University for a while, and then became gallery director in 2004. What is your perspective on the art scene at U of I?

ROWLEY: There’s always been a good community arts scene that has tempered the fluctuations at the university … Though the university leads the scene, there are plenty of artists of regional and national renown to bridge any town-gown divide.

Can you give us a snapshot of what’s happening in the art world today?

There has always been pendulum swings and tensions between traditional and technology in the arts, as well as between politically engaged and apolitical art … At this moment, there is plurality in artistic approaches. The political acrimony, state of the economy, and concerns for the environment are impossible subjects to avoid. At the same time, artists continue to explore aesthetic pursuits. The gallery is very interested in presenting both avenues of expression and by no means sees them as mutually exclusive. This past summer’s [Prichard] exhibit of Stephanie Wilde’s “Golden Bees” is a perfect example — exquisitely beautiful work that also addresses the stress of beehive collapse.

What are the issues you see facing art, artists and art education today?

One of the biggest areas is the perceived value of the arts, particularly as it translates into the resources and efforts put into educating our population in the arts … The current emphasis in education, beyond privatizing and replacing teachers with computers, is to promote STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

So what’s the impact?

In the case of the public education system, in particular, there is only so much time and resources. You have to be taking away from something else … If you want students who have the imagination to turn STEM into the solutions that are required by today’s challenges, then STEM has to turn into STEAM [with A standing for art] … Any approach that lacks an integral arts element will fail, at the fundamental level, to envision and then achieve a future we can feel good about. (Carrie Scozzaro)

Prichard Art Gallery • Fifth and Main streets, Moscow, Idaho • uiweb.uidaho.edu/galleries • (208) 885-3586 • Bill Bowler 25th Anniversary exhibit • open through Oct. 2

Modern Frontiersman

Spokane, meet your new(ish) literary bad-ass

With a title like American Masculine and a cover that’s all spangled stars and colliding bison, Shann Ray’s new book evokes rough-and-tough Hemingway — you expect expressions of the male psyche as it bumps against the foreign and feminine and dances delicately around its own inner turmoil.

But it’s not that.

One of the West’s hottest writers, Ray, who won a Bakeless Prize in 2010 and has been published in McSweeney’s, Narrative and StoryQuarterly, holds a dual MFA in fiction and poetry and boasts a hell of an outside jump shot (he played basketball at Pepperdine and, professionally, in Germany). But he is also a doctor of psychology, and he teaches forgiveness studies at Gonzaga.

His stories, like his academic pursuits, are about confronting all the horrible shit that is done to us and which we do to others, in the hope of finding some path toward self-knowledge and mutual reconciliation.

Ray’s “How We Fall,” the first story in American Masculine, won The Inlander’s short fiction contest in 2008.

He talked to us last week about the debts that writers owe to their past and their families, and about the lives of healing and introspection they owe to themselves.

INLANDER: You write a lot about native peoples. Does it give you pause, writing about a culture that’s not yours?

RAY: Oh yeah. That’s something that America is directly trying to understand in a better way. There’s a dangerous history of what bell hooks calls “white patriarchal oppression.” The nature of the oppressor and the oppressed is for one to unconsciously enact an act of power over another.

I feel like race is a powerful, important beautiful part of life, as gender is. A person has to work hard to understand themselves and then go deeply into art. That will allow us to be listeners and have art that does justice to life.

What’s it like to be a fiction writer and a poet in Spokane?

It’s amazing. Literally amazing. We have a serious hotbed of poets and fiction writers. The action that is happening here — really coming into the consciousness of America — is subtle and alive in Spokane.

The fact that Sherman Alexie is from around here — that, in and of itself, does it. Jess Walter. It’s a center of great literature, and not just literature for literature’s sake. The literature of the West is shaping our consciousness more than nihilistic postmodernism. [Western writers have] modernist notions of what it means to be who we are and are asking important questions. What does it mean to be these races we are? What was Manifest Destiny? What does it mean to have been this rush of multiple cultures?

OK, but what can be improved locally, then?

I think if we can, individually and as a community, recognize that the arts are important and need to keep going and need to be funded.

I don’t know what’s happening with EWU Press right now, but the backlist that that Press had in a short amount of time was incredible. If it could keep going, that would be a national literary press.

Secondly, continued work on the nature of communal living in a diversified culture. Honoring the individual and the collective. We need to face ourselves, our history, especially the darker elements, and face our communal responsibility.

Shann Ray reads from American Masculine • Fri, Sept. 30 at 7 pm • Auntie’s Bookstore • 402 W. Main Ave • Free • auntiesbooks.com • 838-0206