The New Zone: Take an office with wall space, add some artists, then mix ...

The New Zone Arts Collective - once again without a home to call its own - has mounted one of the biggest shows in the group's on-again, off-again 21-year history.

The exhibit is also the biggest art show ever displayed at Oregon Research Institute, a private nonprofit think tank across Franklin Boulevard from the University of Oregon, says Dale McBride, ORI's art coordinator. ORI has staged monthly or bi-monthly art and photography exhibits, primarily for the enjoyment of its employees, since 1993. This is the first time it's hosted members of the New Zone.

"We have 40-plus active members in the group," says New Zone coordinator Steve LaRiccia, who is himself a photographer and artist. ``My goal was to get a lot of them to come down here with three or four works each. My persistence must have paid off.''

In fact, LaRiccia says, nearly the entire membership brought art for the show, which includes some 160 pieces displayed along ORI's wandering halls, in the lobby, even in the mail room.

"There are pieces tucked everywhere," McBride says.

More than 250 people, including Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy, turned out for an opening reception last month for an art show that can be viewed, at least for the public, by appointment only. ORI doesn't allow anyone but employees to wander unescorted through the building.

This is the 87th art show that ORI has exhibited, and McBride says he's booked ahead with artists for the next two years.

The New Zone, which grew out of two earlier cooperatives, the Artists Union and Project Space, was founded in Eugene in 1984 by a group that included Bobby Devine, Harold Hoy and the late David Joyce. First called simply the "Zone," the collective became the New Zone later that year when another organization claimed to have used the name "Zone" first.

At the time, the New Zone saw itself as a cutting edge art collective, and you were invited to join only if your art matched its members' standards of quality. The group fell apart in the early 1990s when it lost its downtown gallery space. It was reconstituted in a new, more-inclusive incarnation in 1995.

"In the old New Zone they would jury and judge the art," LaRiccia says. "We don't do that."

"If you want to be in, you're in," agrees Eugene painter Jerry Ross, who's been a member of both incarnations of the New Zone. "That gives it a nice democratic flavor but an uneven quality to the members' work, of course."

That's clear from a quick look at the ORI show, which includes a wide range of abilities, from professional caliber to beginner. At the top end are New Zone members such as Eugene printmaker Eric Petersen, who recently had a successful show at Eugene's White Lotus Gallery, and Ross, an accomplished painter.

The New Zone is attracting an increasing number of artists because it finds venues to show their work, says Peter Herley, an abstract painter in Eugene and the group's president.

Ross says the new New Zone has taken a "guerrilla" approach to exhibiting art, using space - as at ORI - wherever it can find it. The New Zone has also shown its members' work outdoors, during warmer months, on the Eugene Mall during First Friday Art Walks.

For about 1 1/2 years, the group enjoyed the use of donated gallery space downtown at 1 E. Broadway. But the building was sold last spring, and the collective is back in guerrilla mode. "I think the general consensus is we need a space," Herley said. "It would be a space for us to congregate and a space for people to come talk to artists. Those who would never venture near a gallery could come there and not feel intimidated."

Feb. 13, 2005