Robert Bibler and Carol Hausser papers

Robert Bibler and Carol Hausser met in 1969 during a beginning painting class at the University of Washington, and married in 1971. Robert Bibler was born in 1948. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, and his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While completing his MFA, Bibler worked with John Morrison to co-found The Amherst Film Cooperative in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1972. Bibler and Morrison developed film schedules for the Cooperative and organized public film screenings held at Hampshire College, the Amherst Folklore Center, and venues on the University of Massachusetts campus.

In 1973 Bibler began teaching part-time at Mt. Hood Community College, in Gresham, Oregon and at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. In the fall of 1974, he was hired full-time to develop the Art Program at Chemeketa Community College, where he taught drawing, painting, design, printmaking, and film studies and served as chair of the Art Program. While teaching at Chemeketa, Bibler also developed the Film Studies Program with Leonard Held, Ph.D., an instructor in the English department. In the fall of 1974, a film studies curriculum that included the study of film directors, genres, and cinema history was established at Chemeketa Community College using funds received from a two-year Program Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. These funds also enabled the creation of a weekly campus film series, The Wednesday Evening Film Series, which showcased a diverse selection of movies. The Wednesday Evening Film Series was open to Chemeketa Community College students and the public. Bibler and Held coordinated the series together until Leonard retired in 1996. Bibler continued to coordinate series programming and publicity at Chemeketa Community College until his retirement in 2003. In 2004 The Wednesday Evening Film Series was relaunched at the Historic Elsinore Theatre, in partnership with Chemeketa Community College, offering big-screen presentations in a newly restored 1926 movie palace in downtown Salem, Oregon. At this new location, Bibler coordinated the selection of movies, authored publicity, and wrote or edited the educational program notes distributed at the screenings from the fall of 2004 until the summer of 2015. Bibler has exhibited artwork professionally since 1974. His drawings and paintings utilize classical techniques and traditional genre subjects to explore his interest in implicit narrative, film history, and Renaissance art through figurative representation and symbolism. His works can be found in private and public collections throughout the Pacific Northwest, including the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, as well as in cities in the eastern United States. One of Bibler’s paintings, the official portrait of former Oregon governor Neil Edward Goldschmidt, was on display at the Oregon state Capitol from 1993 until 2011. Bibler was a member of the Blackfish Gallery in Portland, Oregon and was represented by the Lidtke Fine Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington and the Mary Lou Zeek Gallery in Salem, Oregon.

Carol Hausser was born in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1949 but spent most of her childhood in Bozeman, Montana, where she attended a high school with a dynamic art program run by Ray Campeau. During the summers she attended his painting class excursions around Montana, becoming an accomplished plein air painter in both oil and watercolor. She received her BA degree from the School of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle. Hausser took graduate courses in color theory and design at the University of Oregon in 1979-1980. A full-time painter, she also served on the art faculty at Chemeketa Community College from 1976-2016, initially as a part-time instructor of drawing and watercolor, joining the full-time art faculty in 2002, where she served occasionally as the Chair of the Program.

Hausser has exhibited professionally since 1973 and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the region. Fascinated since high school with watercolor, her paintings exhibit a non-traditional use of medium to explore her interest in color and sustained expressive abstraction, developing a visual language and themes “about passages through time and experience, about thought, about the creation of the universe.”

Her works can be found in the collections of the Microsoft Corporation, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the State of Oregon, Chemeketa Community College, and many private collections. Her paintings have been exhibited in the Portland Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Fry Art Museum, Coos Bay Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum at the University of Oregon, Blackfish Gallery, the Sawhill Gallery at James Madison University, the Arts Center in Corvallis, and many other group shows in the Pacific Northwest. She was represented in Seattle by the Lynn McAllister Gallery and in Salem by the Mary Lou Zeek Gallery.