Jim Riswold, the Portland artist and longtime advertising executive whose campaigns for Nike at the Weiden+Kennedy advertising agency helped boost the athletic apparel company’s international image, died Aug. 9 at age 66. Cause of death was interstitial lung disease, and he had battled various cancers for about 25 years.

Riswold was best known for his advertising prowess, creating campaigns featuring Michael Jordan, Spike Lee, Bo Jackson, Tiger Woods and others. But in artistic circles he was known for his sharply pointed satiric works that brought an ad man’s powers of persuasion to political and cultural targets ranging from abusive strong men such as Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin to the racial underpinnings of the United States Civil War: He used mockery as a highly effective artistic weapon.

He also created works that laid bare the physical realities of dealing with cancer. Riswold was diagnosed with leukemia in 2000 and prostate cancer in 2010. In 2012, reviewing for ArtsWatch a group show of nude artworks at Froelick Gallery called “Undressing Room,” Patrick Collier talked about Riswold’s photographic self-portrait (with Ray Gordon), “Riswold’s Owie (without pants)”:

“Indeed, stare death down. Muster a smirk. Be like Jim Riswold. … In the photo, Riswold is post-operative, a catheter in his penis with the urine collection bag strapped to his calf. He has a midline wound that runs from the top of his genital area to his abdomen. He receives oxygen via a nasal canula. We learn from Riswold’s artist’s statement that he had a prostatectomy after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, and these photos were taken shortly after surgery. Still, he is posed, one hand resting on top of the little oxygen dolly, as if he held a cane that was more decoration than support for standing. His legs are crossed as one might imagine a bon vivant might strike a pose in a tuxedo. He is a man in control, defiant in the face of death, and therefore he invites desire.”

More often, the objects of Riswold’s artistic satire pointed outward rather than inward. In his extensive obituary for The Oregonian/Oregon Live, which includes a good deal of information about Riswold’s advertising career, Matthew Kish quoted Mark Fitzloff, former Wieden+Kennedy creative director and later founder of the Portland advertising agency Opinionated: “In marketing, complexity is always the enemy, but rarely identified as such. (Riswold) was able to simplify and distill into such digestible and enjoyable bite-sized ways. He was so perfectly made as a writer.”

“Jim’s superpower was just getting to the truth,” Kish quoted Karl Lieberman, Wieden+Kennedy’s global chief creative officer. “The gravitational pull of advertising is almost always towards exaggeration, hyperbole or just outright dishonesty. But Jim always blew through all of those things and went right at the truth of the matter.”

Those skills for simplification and distillation and his laser focus on finding truth worked equally well in Riswold’s fine art, which can be seen at his longtime gallery, Portland’s Augen Gallery. Often, when aimed at notorious characters or events, his works turned on the pin-prick of psychological deflation.

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Consider “Beer Hall Putsch Hitler (1923),” his 2015 digital-print portrait of a pompous Adolf Hitler wearing a lavishly decorated women’s dress. Nothing’s subtle about the mockery, and perhaps that’s the point: This blowhard of a murderous strong man is someone to be brought down, at least in retrospect, by laughter.

And consider Riswold’s capacity for self-mockery and dark belly-laugh humor in the lengthy title of his 2017 book, Hitler Saved My Life (Warning: This book makes jokes about the Third Reich, the Reign of Terror, World War I, cancer, Millard Fillmore, Chernobyl, and features a full frontal nude photo of an unattractive man), which the New York Journal of Books called “the Blazing Saddles of cancer stories.”

John Olbrantz, director of Salem’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art, became fast friends with Riswold after the museum presented an exhibition of his work titled “Goring’s Lunch” in 2006. “I was heartbroken to hear from his daughter Hallie that my good friend Jim Riswold passed away early Friday morning from complications associated with his 25 year battle with leukemia and prostate cancer,” Olbrantz wrote on Facebook in a lengthy appreciation of his friend. “Jim was 66 and one of the funniest and most creative individuals I have ever known. … Jim never let his illnesses get him down. Indeed, he was always moving forward in his personal and professional life.”

Olbrantz wrote about Riswold’s initial serious forays into art: “Working with a host of plastic toys, dolls, and miniature sets, Jim created staged or arranged image photographs and other mixed media works that poked fun at some of history’s most despicable characters, from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to Benito Mussolini and Mao Zedong. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, he found most of his plastic toys and dolls on the Internet. It started in the early 2000s when he and his son Jake went on the Internet and found a universe of Hitler products, including toys, dolls, books, videos, games, and even garden tools. Bemused and curious, he decided to explore the subject of historical villains and bullies in his artwork.”

The Hallie Ford Museum would present two more exhibitions of Riswold’s work after “Goring’s Lunch.” The 2018 show “Jim Riswold: Undignified” coincided with publication of Riswold’s autobiography How Hitler Saved My Life. “The exhibition poked fun at Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin, and Kim Jong Un, among many others,” Olbrantz wrote, “and I think it represented a high point in his artistic career.”

“Putin on Parade,” in 2022, was assembled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Funds raised from the sale of his artwork in the show went to help support Ukrainian cultural workers and institutions.

“Jim Riswold ws one in a million and I will never forget him,” Olbrantz wrote. “… The last time I saw him was just a few weeks ago. He had been in the hospital for 13 days and was desperate to see me. I couldn’t figure out why, but when I got there, he told me that while he was in the hospital, he’d had a near death experience and was writing a story about it. He knew I was a man of faith, and he told me that after experiencing what he had experienced in the hospital after he had been thought to be dead, he no longer feared death. It had changed his life and his belief in God. Although I sensed the end was near, his startling revelation brought a smile to my face.”

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Riswold is survived by his daughter Hallie Riswold, his son Jake Riswold, his former wife Melinda, and his sisters Sheila Roe and Marilee Hooper.