CAMAS — Lillian Pitt’s life story is like the ordinary clay she transforms into astonishing artworks through hard work, heat and a little bit of unpredictable magic.
Pitt said her parents were marked by stays in those notorious government boarding schools that once aimed to “civilize and Christianize” native children. “They had no rights,” Pitt said, and their tales taught her the safety of staying meek and even avoiding her heritage.
“My father thought I could have a better life if I wasn’t so Indian,” according to Pitt on her website.
Pitt, 74, was born in 1944 on Oregon’s Warm Springs Reservation, In the 1960s, she moved to Portland and worked her way up from hairdresser to beauty school instructor. She liked that work and had no notion about anything different, she said. If it weren’t for a bad back, she might still be dressing hair now.
But her back was terrible, and she kept pursuing jobs that didn’t involve standing up. When she started studying mental health counseling at Mt. Hood Community College, she said, it wasn’t out of any deep desire to heal people. It was her last option.
Here’s the unpredictable magic. Just for the heck of it, Pitt and a friend also signed up for an elective pottery class. That’s where she fell deeply and permanently in love with clay, she said.
“Touching it, smelling it, feeling it, watching the process it goes through,” Pitt said. “It is so magical.”
That’s a word she likes. Pitt’s attitude toward her artworks and her four-decade career remains one of surprise, delight and gratitude. “I think it’s just magical,” she said about the complex and unpredictable colors and textures a Japanese-style anagama kiln adds to her clay finishes.
You can view that magic — in clay, bronze, glass, jewelry and more — this month at the Camas Gallery, where Pitt is the featured artist. She’ll mingle with visitors tonight during downtown’s regular First Friday outing; she’ll also give an artist’s talk at 1 p.m. Saturday.
Fledgling artist Pitt may have fallen in love with clay, but throwing it onto a potter’s wheel still hurt her back. (She’s endured seven back surgeries since then, she said.) So she tried making masks instead. When she showed photographs of her earliest attempts to Navajo artist R.C. Gorman, he immediately wanted to buy two of them. And, he asked this stranger who she was.
“I’m an artist,” Pitt replied — surprising herself with more unpredictable magic. Her mental health coursework may not have helped heal others, but it broke Pitt break out of her shell, she said. Now she knew how to stand up for herself and talk to people — even Gorman, perhaps the most renowned of all American Indian artists at that time.
Years later, at the Camas Gallery, Pitt laughed: “It was so audacious of me.”
Communities
Some artists hate being lumped into categories like “Indian artist.” They seek freedom from labels. They strive to be independent individuals.
Pitt calls that arrogance. Her artwork is all about her heritage, which is Wasco and Yakama as well as Warm Springs, Ore. “You have to have a story. You have to have a reason that fits with yourself. My community is so important to me,” she said.
When she says community, Pitt actually means two different groups. One is her artistic peers and collaborators — the fellow travelers, skilled assistants and art mavens who have invited her to join their working groups, use their kilns and foundries, show in their galleries and even travel to places such as Japan and New Zealand to speak and work as an honored guest artist.
“I keep coming up with bright ideas and all these people keep helping me,” she said. “I am very humbled. I find good people to work with, and they bring out the best.”
The other community is the one that goes back 10,000 years and spans the Columbia River, she said; but it took more unpredictable magic for Pitt to discover it. Full of curiosity at age 36, she returned to Warm Springs, Ore., to personally interview her elders about her heritage.
“That afternoon changed my life,” she wrote later. “I came away with stories about my great grandparents on the Washington side of the Columbia River and my mother’s people on the Oregon side. … I returned to my Portland studio empowered with such a profound sense of identity that I felt privileged to begin making images in clay of the pictographs, petroglyphs and legendary beings of my ancestral homeland.”
Still here
In 2000, Pitt’s growing fame won her a commission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to make a series of bronze plaques based on that ancient Columbia River imagery — much of which disappeared forever when the Corps built dams that raised the river’s water level. Pitt mentioned with satisfaction that one Army Corps leader — a man who became her good friend — apologized to her for that profound loss. Her plaques can be seen at the Celilo Park, Boardman and Roosevelt Park sites.
That project was Pitt’s entry into public art. Her large-scale bronze sculptures adorn Portland transit lines, community centers, parks and colleges; as a partner in the Confluence Project, which brought commemorative public art to numerous sites along Lewis and Clark’s historic route, she created the Welcome Gate on the south side of Maya Lin’s Land Bridge here in Vancouver, as well as several metal panels on the bridge itself.
Pitt may be best known for her many versions of “She Who Watches,” the petroglyph that still watches over what used to be her paternal grandmother’s ancestral village (now Columbia Hills State Park). But before she started reproducing “She Who Watches,” Pitt said, she humbly went to ask her elders for their permission.
Approaching that ancient face “is like going to church,” she said. “You can’t just go there and do anything you want.”
The elders gladly blessed her project, she said. “Please do it,” they told her. “Let everyone else know, we are still here.”
