It’s both easy and hard to wrap your head around I Am This: Art by Oregon Jewish Artists, the elegant small new exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education.

Easy because the choices of artists are mostly familiar to Portland art followers, and because they share curator Bruce Guenther’s taste for modern and contemporary works that deal, whatever else might be going on in them, with the notion of beauty.

Hard because the questions the exhibit asks – What does it mean to be Jewish? What does it mean to be a Jewish artist? What does it mean to be a Jewish artist from Oregon? – are so elusive, with so many different answers, and ultimately with so many unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question marks. “Here we are, looking inward,” museum director Judith Margles remarked at a press preview last week, and maybe that’s at least a large part of what being Jewish means.

Some of the pleasures of Mel’s work are immediate. They can be delightful and witty; they make you smile. But other pleasures await those who start asking some questions about where they came from, how they arrived here, what they are saying. Not that we can ever answer them completely, but for me at least, the real satisfactions are found down that road.

It’s not often an artist is fêted with two concurrent retrospectives, but such is the case this summer with veteran sculptor Mel Katz. Still making rigorous new work at 83, Katz is the subject of an eponymously titled retrospective at Laura Russo Gallery and a more whimsically monikered career survey, Mel Katz: On and Off the Wall, at the Hallie Ford Museum.

The artist—a singular personality and one of the driving forces behind Oregon's contemporary art scene—is a believer in the discipline of being in the studio. "Work begets work," he says. This underlying discipline is perhaps what best describes the fluid arc of Katz's career, which spans more than 50 years yet remains as fresh as ever today.

Mel Katz, the subject of two Oregon retrospectives in June, is an instrumental figure in the region's contemporary art scene, and one of its more lively personalities. Here's a look at his life and work. 

In a jubilant new series of wall sculptures, Mel Katz marries biomorphic shapes, intensely saturated colors, and gleaming finishes. Now in his eighties, Katz has continued to evolve his labor-intensive technique, and is doing quite possibly the finest work of his career.