Oregon ArtsWatch

Arts & Culture News
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Visual Arts

Our visual arts coverage is made possible in part by support from The Ford Family Foundation’s Visual Arts Program.

Palimpsest: Stephen Hayes at Elizabeth Leach Gallery

In a series of large-scale paintings, the artist wrestles with devastation in Gaza through abstraction. New monotypes explore memory and the landscape of the Columbia River Gorge.

Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts navigates transition

November 17, 2025Georgina Ruff

The Biennial at Hallie Ford Museum of Art showcases CSIA's recent prints, celebrates its 33-year legacy, and hints at the organization's priorities moving forward.

In Astoria, a Forest of Native Voices

November 16, 2025Judith Altruda

Prompted by a U.S. stamp of his ancestor Chief Standing Bear, Cliff Taylor’s "Indigenous Visions" exhibit brings together Native artists and writers from across the Pacific Northwest.

Old Portland Hardware Redux: The Secret Life of Salvage

November 15, 2025K.B. Dixon

In the creative hodgepodge of a Sellwood store of practical things, finding grace and beauty in the pared-down shapes of the everyday tools of life.

Oregon Contemporary gallery targeted by Trump Administration

November 12, 2025Jim Redden

A promised $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to help fund the center's 2026 Artists' Biennial is abruptly snatched back. But the show will go on.

Trump takes aim at museums, history

November 12, 2025Jim Redden

As the president rejects funding for art about gender, race, and "anti-American values," historians, museums, and cultural centers across Oregon and the U.S. fight back.

Ghosts of the Flame light up a 5,000 square foot space

November 11, 2025Dee Moore

In a sprawling industrial space at Portland's Building 5, artist Jennifer Gilla Cutshall creates a vivid installation of beauty with a warning about the imperiled planet.

Hallie Ford Museum: Touring collection of works by African American artists has humble, inspiring roots

November 11, 2025David Bates

"Memories & Inspirations: The Kerry and C. Betty Davis Collection of African American Art" started when an Atlanta postal carrier wanted a painting for his home.

Honoring the past, investing in a future in Indigenous art

November 8, 2025Ariella-Sophie Sternberg

At an open house and marketplace at the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde's museum, artists weave a story that carries traditional skills and values into the modern world.

VizArts Monthly: Exuberance

November 5, 2025Raylee Heiden

November may be short on daylight but it is full of bright and joyful art exhibits and events including the grand opening of Portland Art Museum's Rothko Pavilion.

Schneider Museum at Southern Oregon University loses funding for at least three years

October 30, 2025Holly Dillemuth

Plans for a major expansion of the art museum are shelved, and its future is unsure: "You kind of feel like the rug was pulled from underneath you," the museum's director says.

Coming out of ‘hiding’: Clark County Open Studios aims to promote little-known and often unheralded artists

October 29, 2025Jason Vondersmith

51 Clark County artists show off their workspaces for visitors Saturday-Sunday, Nov. 1-2, and the Washougal Studio Artists Tour of 23 artists' studios follows Nov. 15-16.

Liv Rainey-Smith: Woodblock by woodblock, building toward a World Fantasy Award

October 27, 2025Bobby Bermea

The Portland artist talks about the allure of fantasy worlds, the ancient art of woodblock printing, and the long journey that has made her this year's winner of a prestigious international prize.

Touring the Rothko Pavilion with Brian Ferriso

October 21, 2025Brian Libby

As his 19-year tenure reaches an end, Portland Art Museum Director Brian Ferriso leads an enthusiastic tour of his signature achievement, the new Rothko Pavilion.

Emerald Art Center: The ‘real’ Springfield’s art heart

October 19, 2025Ester Barkai

The 68-year-old nonprofit is famous for its mural of The Simpsons, but local artists know it for classes, workshops, youth camps, and gallery space.

‘Electric Mixer’ at Ditch Projects

October 18, 2025Ester Barkai

The Springfield gallery's latest show celebrates art with an affinity for late 20th-century technology, particularly the beloved children's drawing software program 'Kid Pix.'

Lincoln City Cosmography honors the natural world, as well as the memory of its designer, Robin Brailsford

October 17, 2025Lori Tobias

The LithoMosaic mandala, to be dedicated during a Nov. 1 open house, is the capstone of the Lincoln City Cultural Center’s plaza restoration project.

Portland Art Museum reaches $116 million capital campaign goal

October 16, 2025Bob Hicks

A month before the unveiling of its decade-long construction and expansion project that reinvents the downtown museum's galleries and campus, all the money is in hand.

Work of 10 mural artists brightens once-drab concrete walls of Nye Beach’s staircase in Newport

October 8, 2025Lincoln Chronicle

The work, with the theme "All Things Newport," includes lighthouses, bridges, tsunami warning signs, and hummingbirds.

Eugene-based Quiltfolk celebrates the color and creativity of quilts, including the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show

October 7, 2025Fran Gardner

Each issue of the 8-year-old quarterly magazine focuses on a different state or region, with handsome photography, clean layout — and no ads.

Marie Watt’s banner fall season

October 2, 2025Laurel Reed Pavic

The Portland-based artist has had a string of recent successes. Among them is her first hometown retrospective, 'Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation' on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University.

VizArts Monthly: October Reflections

September 30, 2025Raylee Heiden

October boasts Portland Open Studios as well as Sitka's 31st Art Invitational at Oregon Contemporary. Read on to explore art options to accompany all of your pumpkin-related pursuits!

Freddie Robins’ webs of protection

September 26, 2025Hannah Krafcik

The textile artist and "radical knitter" explores the many angles of protection in "Apotropaic" on view at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery.

Dao Strom, re-associating yellow at TBA

September 20, 2025Lucy Cotter

Review: In "Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs" at PICA's Time-Based Art Festival, Strom and collaborators rethink Asian stereotypes and the diaspora through poetry, music, memory, and Vietnamese creation myth.

A way forward from the homeless crisis

September 20, 2025Friderike Heuer

The Oregon Historical Society's exhibition of Jim Lommasson's close look at the work of Portland's Street Roots newspaper reveals the face of poverty and suggests ways to break the cycle.

The sacred outcasts deserve support and protection: an interview with Demian DinéYazhi

September 18, 2025Gili Rappaport

"The blessings will test you" : Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist reflects on ancestry, survival, and their recent work on Fire Island.

Nancy Eng’s Emotional Spaces and Places

September 17, 2025Dee Moore

Review: The artist's landscapes at the Salem Art Association's Annex Gallery veer into the abstract. "I have no one process," she says. "I do a lot of experimenting."

Portland muralist Gary Hirsch, creator of whimsical robots of joy, branches out in upcoming book, ‘Monster Transformation’

September 15, 2025Fran Gardner

The artist and consultant’s playful robots offer inspiration from Portland walls; now he turns his hand to monsters in the workplace in a volume on organizational transformation, scheduled to come out in December.

Exuberant & unexpected: Ricky Bearghost’s weavings

September 9, 2025Hannah Krafcik

On view at Elbow Room, "Rug Farm" features weavings made with traditional, found and foraged materials. The vibrant compositions underscore the inevitability of interconnection.

Art on the Road: Some thoughts on heritage

September 6, 2025Friderike Heuer

Discovering the pioneer pleasures of Thompson's Mills, Oregon's newest State Heritage Site, and the loss of a deeper Indigenous history in the closure of Five Oaks Museum.