Bend’s biggest little art show is back! The Museum is once again honored to host this year’s 20-Dollar Art Show, presented by Bright Place Gallery. Featuring nearly 9,000 pieces of original art by local and emerging artists, this year’s show promises to be the biggest yet. Each mini masterpiece goes on sale for the low, low price of $20 during the Extravaganza weekend, October 17-20. Prior to that weekend, the exhibition is open for viewing, browsing and admiring only.
Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky is a career retrospective of the nationally renowned Indigenous artist. From wall-sized installations to miniatures and baskets, the exhibition features close to 100 pieces from Feddersen’s prolific 40-year career. The exhibition is organized by the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, Washington, and curated by heather ahtone, director of curatorial affairs, First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, and Rachel Allen, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.
Art in the West is an annual juried fine art exhibition and online silent auction featuring art that celebrates the landscapes, wildlife, people, cultures and history of the High Desert—a region that stretches from the eastern slope of the Cascades and Sierras to the Wyoming Basin and Colorado Plateau. Featuring nearly 120 pieces from 80-plus nationally and regionally acclaimed artists, the entire collection is on exhibit at the High Desert Museum and the 2025 Gallery Guide is available to view online!
The Kids Curate exhibition opens at the High Desert Museum on May 3! This year third and fourth graders from La Pine Elementary focused on the diverse perspectives of fire — from an agricultural tool to community threat to natural process. Come enjoy the students’ charcoal and acrylic paint artworks based on what they learned over months of special in-class visits as well as field trips to the Museum.
Patterns at Play: Fractals in Nature is an original exhibition that invites you to take a closer look at the universe’s curious practice of self-organization. An immersive, family-friendly experience, the exhibit encourages you to build your own patterns while an animation creates new fractals right before your eyes. Visitors should expect to play, touch, listen and watch in this whimsical exploration of nature.
At the dawn of the 20th century, the Indigenous peoples of North America regularly faced narratives that they would soon disappear, be it from artists, academics or politicians. Yet Japanese immigrant and photographer Frank Sakae Matsura (1873-1913) approached his artistry differently. He arrived in the U.S. in 1901 and made Okanogan County, a rural expanse of High Desert in northern Washington state, his home. There, he grew strong relationships with the area’s tribal communities. The resulting body of work includes some of the most visually powerful and nuanced images of Indigenous people from the era.
Featuring more than one dozen contemporary works, accomplished painter Hilary Baker explores the complex relationship between manmade spaces and native wildlife. Highlighting iconic architecture and wildlife as both prominent and enigmatic, each work invites an encounter and raises questions about our own proximity to wildlife.
Flannel is more than a fabric. Flannel shirts, jackets and undergarments have played an important role for laborers in the High Desert. Workers have donned flannel as they logged trees and roped cattle. Later, grunge counterculture adopted flannel as a nod to nonfashion. Blood, Sweat & Flannel explores the region’s labor history though the lens of the beloved fabric.
Featuring nearly two dozen works from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, this exhibition highlights sculptural and two-dimensional works by one of the Northwest’s most celebrated artists, Rick Bartow (Mad River Band of the Wiyot Tribe,1948-2016)
Leave your pop-culture notions behind as you learn about the past, present and future of Sasquatch through the work of five Native artists. See their representations, stories and artwork about this “non-human other” and learn how they vary between tribes across regions in this High Desert Museum original exhibition.