Mylan Rakich
Posted by petra.sairanen
A Life in Art and Teaching
- Dates: March 5 – April 25, 2025
- Reception and Celebration of Life: April 5, noon – 3pm
- Gallery hours:
- Monday – Friday 9am – 4pm
- Saturdays by appointment
This is a memorial exhibition for PCC instructor Mylan Rakich III, who passed away suddenly on August 5, 2024. Mylan was hired at PCC Rock Creek in 2001 by Dick Helzer, another beloved Rock Creek sculpture instructor, for whom this gallery is named. Mylan was born in Rome, NY on April 18, 1968. He earned a BFA in sculpture and drawing from SUNY Purchase in 1992, an MFA in Sculpture from Portland State University in 2000, and a 2-year Certificate in Welding Technology from Portland Community College in 2009. Mylan taught sculpture, drawing and design courses at PCC Rock Creek, Hillsboro, Sylvania, and Newberg campuses from 2001-2024. He also held faculty positions at Clackamas Community College, and the University of Portland. Mylan exhibited work nationally, and was represented by Butters Gallery in Portland, OR. He is best known for his large steel sculptures which can be found in many private and public collections, including Wisconsin and Georgia, and locally at PCC Rock Creek and Cascade campuses, Clackamas Community College, and Kershaw and Associates. In addition to his sculptural work, Mylan also completed many artistic commissions and collaborations around Oregon, including work for the Hyatt Centric, Hillsboro elementary school, and Blue Moon Photography in North Portland, where Mylan lived. He is survived by his widow Ariane, his sons Ben and Jefferson, and his father Mylan Rakich Jr.
Special thanks to everyone who helped with this exhibition, especially Ariane Rakich, Mark Andres, Aren Lawler, Mark Smith, and the PCC Art Club.
Appreciation of Mylan Rakich III (1968-2024)
by Mark Andres
I could always count on Mylan to teach me something. When he had his students draw from a still life using only electric tape and an exact-o knife, I was impressed. The drawings were handsome and modern in feeling, with clear, sculptural planes in space. And then came that assignment when he had his students draw a giant ear on a sheet of 24×18 paper. “What’s with the big ears?” people would ask. “Have you ever really looked at an ear?” Mylan answered. “They are so weird!” I ate lunch under that display of ear drawings for two weeks, until they looked like slugs, shells, eels, caves, wings. So what if I lost my appetite; I had learned another new thing from Mylan.
We were colleagues for 20 years. I adored his positive energy, his openness to grow and develop both as an educator and as an artist. He inspired his students and he inspired me. He helped make Rock Creek a fun place for visual inquiry and positive energy. I loved his willingness to just say yes, his deep conviction that this ridiculous, humiliating and often thankless life in art was the only one that made sense.
Mylan’s sculpture also taught me things. A love of materials runs all through his work in wood, plaster and concrete, but it is in steel that he truly shines. Those constructions— vertical, elegant, weightless, delicate, are gestural metaphors for a body dancing, singing, stretching, vibrating like a harp, joyfully alive. The forces of lightness and weight. When he once explained to me that his first name was the same as my favorite Czech novelist, I recalled a passage from Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” that could have been his artist statement:
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
Mylan could make solid steel feel weightless and make a tiny piece of cardboard supporting a plaster spike feel like it weighed a ton. It was the magic of art. It was a refusal to reduce things to any simple dichotomy and let the energies in those forms embody their contradictions for each viewer.
Mylan’s final lesson to me in contradictions came last August. We were up at the University of Portland planning an exhibition for the Buckley Gallery. We could get pretty animated when we talked and had to watch our language around the priests who occasionally walked by us. When we parted, Mylan said, “next time we get together we’re going to hang out longer and swear more!”
But when I saw him again only three days later, he was brain dead in his hospital bed. His wife, Ariane, invited me to touch his powerful arm, still warm, for the last time. That touch made me feel I was crossing a threshold. His family and colleagues gathered around the bed, some shattered, some numb, as we followed it gliding down the corridor past the hospital staff, all of whom had left their stations to stand on either side of the corridor to pay respect as his body was wheeled away to the operating room, where his organs would be harvested. Watching the elevator doors close on my friend I wondered how it is one can be heavy and then light, how one can be here and not here, how we know our friend is gone and still feel they are around? I felt both outside those elevator doors and inside that elevator. Ariane told me someone would receive his eyes. Those were good eyes, I thought. They saw a lot.
Sometimes the art life does seem like a wild, misguided, confusing, humiliating, and quintessentially impractical yet exultant dream of life. We artists do not know the impact our teaching or our artwork has on people. It is impossible to know, and maybe that is as it should be. But Mylan had a big impact on me. I know Mylan is gone, but I can still touch him in his work. His spirit shines all over this exhibition, and you will find it also whenever you stop to experience his art on the campus where he taught for so many years and where many of us learned from him.