An Eagle’s Full-Circle Experience in the Arts

Back around 2011, Eagle alumna Danielle Knapp ’06 — then just a year or two into her first curatorial post at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, or JSMA, at the University of Oregon — found herself standing in front of a striking work of art at the Oregon state capitol building. It was comprised of a unified grid of nine oil paintings, all depicting dramatically abstracted landscapes. They were dense, geological, alive with vivid color. Each frame, physically removed from its neighbors, nevertheless seemed to amplify and intensify the whole. Taken together, they made a profound impression.

“I’ve never seen this artist’s work before,” she remembered thinking. “I would definitely remember it if I had.”

Amazed and intrigued, Knapp soon discovered the work was created by the Pendelton, Oregon-based artist James Lavadour, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation whose visionary paintings were attracting the attention of the wider art world.

Now, more than a decade-and-a-half later, Knapp, who today serves as the JSMA’s McCosh Curator, has assembled the first major retrospective of Lavadour’s long career. The exhibition is currently on view at Spokane’s Museum of Arts and Culture, the same place where, in a way that seems somehow fitting, her own creative journey got its jump-start.

An Exceptional Eagle

It’s a professional arc that’s not lost on Knapp. She grew up, she says, as an Air Force brat, relocating every couple of years as her father, a tanker pilot, bounced with the family from base to base. His final posting before retirement was at Fairchild Air Force Base. Knapp, then a 10^th grader at Medical Lake High School, soon learned to love the Inland Northwest and was determined to stay.

Success in school reinforced that determination. Knapp was a stand-out student, the co-valedictorian of her graduating class. When it came time to choose a college, she could have gone anywhere. But she applied to exactly one school: Eastern Washington University.

During the second quarter of her first year, Knapp walked into an art history course taught by then EWU faculty member Lanny DeVuono, herself an accomplished artist. It wasn’t long before everything changed.

“I had moved my whole life,” she says, “and now I lived in a place I really liked. I thought, ‘I really don’t want to keep moving.’” It helped that her soon-to-be husband Chris — they were high school sweethearts; he was also a military kid — had already enrolled at EWU, a year ahead of her. But the decision was about more than love. Knapp wanted to be a high school history teacher, and Eastern’s education program seemed like a perfect fit. She enrolled in EWU’s Honors Program and was on her way.

Fate would soon intervene. During the second quarter of her first year, Knapp walked into an art history course taught by then EWU faculty member Lanny DeVuono, herself an accomplished artist. It wasn’t long before everything changed.

“She was such an engaging lecturer,” Knapp recalls. “I remember, probably two weeks into that class, thinking: ‘If they offer a degree in this, that’s what I’ll do.’” There was, in fact, such a degree program. Knapp declared herself an art history major, adding a French language minor. She then embarked on a course of study that allowed her, she says, to indulge her every curiosity— foreign languages, global cultures and, of course, the working in the art world.

This final interest wasn’t entirely new to her: Knapp’s parents had made museum visits a fixture in every city that the family landed. “How do you get to know your new community?” she remembers them saying. “You go to museums.” At EWU, Barbara Miller, now a professor emerita of art history, became another formative presence, introducing Knapp to the critical and research skills that would undergird her eventual curatorial career.

It was a fellow student, however, not a faculty member, who delivered perhaps the most consequential nudge of her undergraduate years. A classmate mentioned that Lorinda Knight, then the proprietor of a prominent Spokane art gallery, might be looking for a winter intern. Knapp emailed Knight, got the position, and from there earned a recommendation for a second internship, this time at the MAC. By spring, she had secured the gig.

To the MAC, and Back

“It could all have been theoretical. Instead it was practical skills,” Knapp says, of the MAC experience. She describes how a then-MAC curator, Ryan Hardesty (now executive director and curator of exhibitions and collections at Washington State University’s Jordan Schnitzer outpost), brought her into meetings, took her on art delivery trips and involved her in evaluating exhibition layouts.

“He was including me really intentionally, exposing me to different aspects of his day-to-day work,” Knapp says. “That, combined with art handling skills both at the gallery and at the museum helped me to see how to safely move artwork and how it’s stored; I learned about the decision-making process in how an artwork is displayed. Does the artist do it? Is it the curator? What other factors contribute? Those were real-life skills.”

After a gap year working at a Spokane-based student travel company, Knapp enrolled in the master’s program at the University of Oregon, drawn by its teaching fellowships and the promise of Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art access from day one. She never left. After graduation, the museum offered her a staff curatorial position, and she has built her career there, balancing time between the David McCosh Memorial Collection and broader American art projects.

After her serendipitous introduction to James Lavadour’s work, the power of his creative vision stayed with her. Over the years at the JSMA, she made a point of seeking out his latest creative output and took advantage of opportunities to engage with the artist himself. When, more recently, her boss at the Jordan Schnitzer began asking which living Oregon artist was most overdue for a major institutional retrospective, Knapp’s answer arrived quickly.

“James Lavadour, of course. Our director and I both thought, ‘How has no one done this yet?’”

Thus began the process that yielded “James Lavadour: Land of Origin,” an exhibition three years in the making that involved sometimes complicated negotiations for loans of Lavadour paintings and prints, navigating grant applications, mastering shipping logistics and engaging in creative dialogue with Lavadour. For its Spokane stop, Knapp worked with Rachel Allen, the MAC’s curator of special projects, to ensure that Lavadour’s signature grid paintings, his individual panels and his prints had a harmonious home in the museum’s main exhibition space. The exhibition will travel to four more museums after it closes in Spokane this June.

The exhibition’s opening back in January generated a big buzz in local media, and attendance has been robust since. Among the early attendees were students of EWU’s Marc La Pointe, a faculty lecturer in fine arts. His fine arts thesis students toured the exhibit with Knapp, who shared insights about both the art and its curation. “The visit to the MAC was pivotal: the students were truly inspired,” La Pointe said afterward, adding that they are now more than ever “eager to apply their degrees and artistic passions to cultivate art spaces that energize community.”

“James Lavadour: Land of Origin,” runs through June 7 at the MAC. The museum is located at 2316 West 1st Ave., in Spokane. Its hours are Tuesday – Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and, on the last Wednesday of each month, from 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Regular adult admission is $15. Students with ID, $12.