California Conversations (Zoom) with Gallerist Charles Froelick on Rick Bartow

Thursday, June 22, 2PM

California Conversations (ZOOM)
Gallerist Charles Froelick discusses First California Artist Rick Bartow

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Charles Froelick is the owner of Froelick Gallery in Portland Oregon and will discuss his unique and longstanding professional and personal relationship with First California artist Rick Bartow. Says Froelick, “In 1991 I moved to Portland, Oregon, and in 1992 I met Rick Bartow. By 1995 I opened my own gallery and began representing Rick’s work, collaborating closely on all aspects of his career for the remainder of his life. When Rick’s health began to fail, I assisted in establishing his legal Trusts to carry his legacy forward after his passing and have represented the Bartow Trusts since 2016. Currently, Froelick Gallery represents Rick Bartow’s secondary market, and Moon and Dog Press and Master Printer Seiichi Hiroshima of Tokyo, this collection includes Bartow’s two hundred plus drypoint works, drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio family, which are editioned with Hiroshima, as well as the monotypes they produced together.” Froelick is an active member of the Portland arts community. Serving as a board member of the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts and the Portland Art Dealers Association. Charles worked with the Friends of the Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts, and both member and President of the Board of Advisors at the Portland Art Museum. He served on the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s Public Art Advisory Committee in Portland.

Rick Bartow, 1946 – 2016 (Wiyot/Mad River Band)

Rick Bartow’s four-decade career included both expressionistic paintings and sculptures, and concentrated largely on personal experiences and Native American transformation stories that merge human and animal forms. He was featured in the Wheelwright’s 2006 exhibition About Face: Self Portraits by Native American, First Nation, and Inuit Artists, which considered the evolution of Native American self-representation from early focus on communal identity and examining the emergence of individualistic portrayals. More recently two sculptures, called, We Were Always Here, sit at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution museum entrance. In 2022, the Whitney Museum of American Art added four of Rick Bartow’s works on paper to their permanent collection, exemplifying and validating his unique mark-making, his approach to figuration, movement, and narrative. In 1969, he both received his BA from Western Oregon State College and left to serve in Vietnam. Bartow’s artistic career began in earnest in the 1980s as part of his recovery from the trauma of war. His artistic influences range from painters Francis Bacon, Odilon Redon, and Marc Chagall, to traditional Native American arts and culture. Bartow was also a musician and songwriter.