A Memorial Site
James D. Dean
1931 – 2024
Artist · Administrator · Champion of Art in the Space Age
Bureau of Reclamation · 1969
Grand Coulee Dam
In the late 1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation embarked on an unusual program: to present its accomplishments to the American public through the medium of art. Under the direction of John DeWitt of the Commissioner’s Office in Washington, DC, and Dr. Lloyd Goodrich, Advisory Director of the Whitney Museum of Modern Art, forty of America’s most prominent artists were commissioned to visit water resource development sites throughout the western United States and record their impressions.
The artists were given a free hand to depict a subject of their choosing — as long as it pertained to a Reclamation program — and were welcome to use whatever medium and style they wished. When the project was completed, more than 375 works had been created.
Selected Artists
The Grand Coulee Visit, 1969
Around 1969, James Dean traveled to Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State to document its massive scale and the ongoing construction of its Third Powerplant. The series of works he produced from that visit are distinctive — a departure from the seascapes and New England landscapes, turned toward something rawer: excavation, concrete, the physical transformation of a landscape.
Exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, March–May 1972
The painting disappears down the hole, which the viewer sees from above and the side. The eye is drawn down by the darker opaque areas. Starting in the upper left corner with the elongated dark patch of ground, the viewer is pulled across to the dam, which is also dark. The dam acts as a funnel, directing the eye down, at which point the dark rock around the rim of the hole pulls the eye around the edge. Finally, the viewer is led into the hole itself by the workers on cables.
Bureau of Reclamation — U.S. Department of the Interior, Artist Biography: James Dean →Works from the Grand Coulee Visit
- Grand Coulee Flowers (1969)
- A softer look at the vegetation surrounding the industrial site
- The Dam and the Hole (1969)
- Depicting the massive excavation for the new Third Powerplant — exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, 1972
- Vista Point (1969)
- A landscape perspective of the dam and its setting
- Concrete Foundations (1969)
- Focusing on raw materials and the structural engineering of the project
- Carving the Slots: Third Powerplant (1969)
- Documenting the physical labor of modifying the dam for its expanded capacity
The National Gallery Exhibition, 1972
The American Artist and Water Reclamation
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
March 25 – May 5, 1972
A selection from the more than 300 paintings, watercolors, and drawings commissioned by the Bureau of Reclamation of the United States Department of the Interior to record projects in the western United States. The pictures resulted from visits to Reclamation projects in nine western states, by Lamar Dodd, James Dean, William Gropper, Fletcher Martin, Billy Morrow Jackson, Peter Hurd, Joseph Hirsch, Richard Diebenkorn, and other leading artists. Lloyd Goodrich, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, recommended the artists who were invited to participate. A group of the pictures was later circulated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.
The photograph above was taken on Tri-X Pan film — the Kodak black-and-white stock that defined documentary and fine art photography through much of the twentieth century. Behind the boy, one of his father’s works is visible on the gallery wall — the painting on the right, the circular form of The Dam and the Hole.
