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I’d like to thank Quinn Elliott and Jason Huff for inviting me to curate the exhibition. Jason’s technical support has been phenomenal, as has Samantha Scherer’s work on the catalogue design and production. My curatorial assistant Christine Charters made a huge difference as usual, as has practical help from Isabel Kahn, Matthew Kramer of Crater, Karol Priebe of U-Frame-It Ballard, and photographers Richard Nicol, Christopher Dahl and Douglas Tucker.

No single exhibition can encompass all the art of Joe Reno, a Seattle-born artist who has lived in the Ballard neighborhood since 1950. Trained at the Art Students League in New York, Reno’s unique sensibility combines the realistic grounding in figure drawings of his teacher Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978) with a churning expressionism that arose and subsided over the period of the artist’s 40-year career.

The present exhibition narrows the focus of Reno’s art to works on paper (A prior retrospective in 1984 concentrated only on self-portraits). Viewers may see both a wide range of material approaches and printmaking techniques and a taste of the artist’s subjects: portraits, self-portraits, landscapes,

full-length figures, abstractions, and nudes. Highly traditional in terms of available topics, Reno’s art is made distinct and individual through his material alterations and
adjustments, his evocation of heightened states of consciousness, and a seesawing attitude toward the open- ended or highly finished artwork.

At the time of the 1984 survey I curated, Reno seemed to have anticipated the trend at the time of Neo-Expressionism. Today, 23 years later, that may still be true but, with the waning and critical downgrading of that movement (begun in Germany, where Reno lived between 1963 and 1964), a different case must be made for the artist’s significance and continued relevance to contemporary art.

When we contemplate the renegade polymath aspect of Reno’s endeavor—printmaking, painting, and sculptural assemblages, bronzes and ceramics as well as music, video, photography and computer art—then the artist, whose earliest works drew praise from Mark Tobey (1890-1976), re-emerges instead as a post-modernist: dabbling all over the place, seeking the appropriate studio practice to convey his multiple artistic identities and subjective concepts of self, spirituality, ecology, gender, and innocence.

was working in the mailroom of the Museum of Modern Art. Continue with the nearby sampling of other early works, drypoint etchings and lithographs, and an important example of Reno’s appropriation and responses to artists he admires, After Munch’s Man on Beach (1983).

Landscape and street scenes done between 1981 and 2006 give an idea of growing skills, stylistic shifts (from calm to panicked), and the artist’s deep commitment to the celebration and preservation of the Pacific Northwest environment. The scenes of the Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound (2002, 2006) are from the viewpoint of Golden Gardens Park in Ballard where, since the age of 16, Reno has spent summers (and some winters) capturing the shifting sunlight, sunrises and sunsets. The mountains and civic structures on the beach are recipients of Reno’s alternately tight and improvisatory approach to composition.

Selected examples from the Mystique series reveal Reno’s approach toward abstraction. A takeoff on Tobey’s “white writing,” all squiggles and curlicues, the Mystiques on view (1982-1999) confirm the artist’s overlooked evolution as a colorist and, like late-period Jackson Pollock, his taste for hidden or submerged heads and faces.

Upstairs, figuration dominates. Usually an isolated head, partial or full figure, these works expose a darker side, Reno the once and future Neo-Expressionist. Far less classical than the male and female nudes near the reception desk, the prints and paintings on paper upstairs delve into realms of emotional and psychological states. They offer a contrast to the celebration of nature downstairs.

Face of Death (Self-Portrait) (1967) is a key early work, accompanied by other examples using black inks, black paint and even black paper (Untitled, 1970). This suite of works illustrates how Reno has violated many of the conventional rules of printmaking to achieve his desired effect. In some ways, he is a painter’s printmaker. In Roselli (1986) and Chris Dahl (1990), portraits of friends, Reno pushes the limits of the etching and woodcut.

Celebration, anger, despair, ecstasy and the exaltation of nature are among the dominant themes in the art of Joe Reno. Viewing the exhibition, one may contemplate an artist’s dedication and life journey in the form of these dazzling achievements.