BTAF Statement top
BlueTower Arts Foundation is a fellowship of artists vitally interested in contemporary art, its ideas, practices and powers of communication.
BlueTower Arts Foundation exists to develop dialogue and production in the contemporary arts across the full range of media and practice. BTAF’s mission is to foster a vibrant, humane, aesthetic grammar informed by traditional, contemporary and emerging art practices. We seek a rigorous and open conversation that engages with historical and contemporary philosophical and religious ideas. Put briefly, BTAF desires to foster art making that explores both the beauty and exigencies of our present world and human condition.
(BTAF is a federally approved (501-C3) non-profit organization whose available resources support a mission of arts education and production.)
Why We Exist top
We believe art can make a difference in the world. All art making is, at bottom, an enterprise, investment and communication of the experience and exploration of what it means to be human in the 21st Century.
Therefore, BTAF sees the need to support and facilitate art making grounded in the conviction that the world social and spiritual situation can be enlightened and given meaning and hope through the practices of contemporary art. Put differently, BTAF stands for art that questions, explores and communicates the joys as well as difficult truths of our present human condition. As George Steiner has pointed out, art has critical as well as expressive powers:
“Art embodies selective interactions between what is observed in the world and the boundless possibilities of the imagined… Be it realistic, fantastic, utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world… Such formed intensity of sight and of speculative ordering is, always, a critique. It says things that might be (have been, shall be) otherwise.” (Real Presences, p.11)
The vision for BlueTower Arts Foundation centers on the idea that art making is a vital and powerful means of communicating what we believe is true. Art always, in one way or another, simply or in a complex and enigmatic manner, presents or mirrors a vision of life— this is inevitably a spiritual vision. In modern history perhaps the primary means of exploring our humanness has occurred in social theory and philosophy. Increasingly, however, we are a culture construed and grounded in the sensibilities of the image. We are moving from being primarily a word-based culture to one based in the power of images. Art is an important bridge for communicating across all human boundaries- race, gender, national, religious and ethnic. In these cultural conditions, and in the spirit of desiring to pursue and know truth, BTAF desires to facilitate art that creates a more thoughtful, humane world.
History of BTAF top
In the summer of 2004 BTAF was founded in Eugene, Oregon by a small group of Christian artists concerned with anti-intellectual, culturally disengaged dynamics within Christian culture. Our desire is to study contemporary art and practice that enables dialogue across secular / religious boundaries. Making great and important art is the common language of both communities. Art and its making provide a lavishly fertile common ground for exploring and expressing what we find compellingly true.
At its founding BTAF leased a property and facilities for a small residence, studio work space, education and dialogue for student and emerging artists. BTAF had to give up that facility through a shortage of funding. BTAF continues to pursue the same vision and mission of a place for contemporary art production, education and dialogue. We remain actively engaged in the pursuit of finding and re-establishing physical facilities to expand and make possible our support of contemporary art dialogue and production.
Who We Are top
BlueTower was started by Wes Hurd and Craig Doerksen, and we are still two of the principals in it. Below are some short bios on us, as well as of our existing board members.
Principals
Wesley Hurd - wes@bluetowerarts.org
Wesley Hurd received his undergraduate degree in art education at Southern Oregon University. He holds an M.F.A in painting and a Ph.D. in Educational Policy from the University of Oregon. In 1979, Wes founded McKenzie Study Center based in Eugene, OR. He has taught as an adjunct assistant professor of art at the University of Oregon, and is currently a tutor at Gutenberg College, a great books college in Eugene. Wes has been awarded two graduate teaching fellowships at the University of Oregon and was an adjunct assistant Professor in painting in 2001 and 2002. Wes is co-founder of BlueTower Arts Foundation and serves as a principle teacher and chairman of the Board of Directors for the organization. He was nominated for the Portland Art Museum’s Northwest Contemporary Art Award in 2007. See his work here.
Craig Doerksen - craig@bluetowerarts.org
Craig Doerksen has B.A. in English, University of Oregon and an M.A. in English, University of Ireland, Maynooth. Craig is co-founder of BlueTower Arts Center. He comes with an extensive background in ministry and management, including strategic planning and program development. He spent eight years with Young Life in direct ministry and in management at Young Life’s Washington Family Ranch in Oregon. He was most recently the Upper School Principal at Trinity Academy of Raleigh, a classical Christian school in North Carolina. Craig is a natural leader and instructor, teaching courses incorporating the various disciplines of the humanities. Craig is a writer, mostly fiction, or writing that is fictitious in nature, if not in appearance.
Director of Development
Courtney Stubbert - courtney@bluetowerarts.org
Courtney Stubbert has a B.A. in Art History from the University of Oregon and an A.A. in Visual Communications from the Art Institute of Seattle. He is Sr. Graphic Designer for Imagination International, Inc., the North American importer and distributor of Copic Markers. He also freelances as a graphic designer under the studio name PUNCH. He is a practicing fine artist and musician.