Keith Allen Haring was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. In addition to solo gallery exhibitions, he participated in renowned national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. The Whitney Museum held a retrospective of his art in 1997.
Carl A. Morris was an American painter, born in Yorba Linda, California. Morris studied at the Chicago Art Institute and in Paris and Vienna. He opened the Spokane Art Center through the Federal Art Project during the Great Depression. Morris met his wife, sculptor Hilda Grossman, when he recruited her as a teacher for the center. Moving to Seattle in 1940, they met Mark Tobey and became lifelong friends.
Robert H. Colescott was an American painter. He is known for satirical genre and crowd subjects, often conveying his exuberant, comical, or bitter reflections on being African American. He studied with Fernand Léger in Paris. Colescott's work is in many major public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Richard Elmer "Rick" Bartow was a Native American artist and a member of the Mad River band of the Wiyot Tribe, who are indigenous to Humboldt County, California. He primarily created pastel, graphite, and mixed media drawings, wood sculpture, acrylic paintings, drypoint etchings, monotypes, and a small number of ceramic works.
Thelma Beatrice Johnson Streat (1912–1959) was an African-American artist, dancer, and educator. She gained prominence in the 1940s for her art, performance and work to foster intercultural understanding and appreciation.
Harold J. Schnitzer was an American businessman, civic leader, and philanthropist. Schnitzer is best remembered for having made over $80 million in charitable gifts over the course of his lifetime, including the establishment of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon and at the University of Oregon.
Eric Norstad (1924-2013) was an American potter and architect who worked primarily on the west coast of the United States.
Oregon Art Beat is a weekly television show that airs on Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB). Oregon Art Beat features Oregon musicians, artists, and cultural events. Oregon Art Beat was created in 1999 by Jeff Douglas, a longtime radio broadcaster in Portland, Oregon who had been hired at Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) as a producer. He was working on Oregon Field Guide when he started producing stories for a new show about the arts in Oregon. He became the executive producer of the program and remained on the show until he promoted Jessica Martin, a longtime producer at the station, to succeed him in 2009.
Sherrie Wolf is an American photo-realistic painter and printmaker based in Portland, Oregon who has won multiple awards for her work. She has been described as "one of Portland's most prominent artists."
Arlene Schnitzer was an American arts patron and philanthropist. She was the founder and director of the Fountain Gallery, established in Portland to showcase artists in the Pacific Northwest. She is the namesake of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, a performing arts center in Portland, Oregon.
Phyllis Yes is an Oregon-based artist and playwright. Her artistic media range from works on painted canvas to furniture, clothing, and jewelry. She is known for her works that “feminize” objects usually associated with a stereotypically male domain, such as machine guns, hard hats, and hammers. Among her best-known artworks are “Paint Can with Brush,” which appears in Tools as Art, a book about the Hechinger Collection, published in 1996 and her epaulette jewelry, which applies “feminine” lace details to the epaulette, a shoulder adornment that traditionally symbolizes military prowess. In 1984 she produced her controversial and widely noted “Por She,” a silver 1967 Porsche 911-S, whose body she painstakingly painted in highly tactile pink and flesh-toned lace rosettes. She exhibited it at the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in New York in 1984 and drove it across the United States as a traveling exhibition in 1985. In 2016, she wrote her first play, Good Morning Miss America, which began its first theatrical run at CoHo Theatre in Portland, Oregon in March 2018.
The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education is the largest museum dedicated to the documented and visual history of the Jews of Oregon, United States. The Museum is dedicated to the preservation, research, and exhibition of art, archival materials, and artifacts of the Jews and Judaism in Oregon.
Cynthia Lahti is an American contemporary artist from Portland, Oregon, who works in many mediums: "from collage to ceramics, altered books, and painting".
LaVerne Erickson Krause (1924–1987) was an American artist. She founded the University of Oregon printmaking program and taught there for twenty years, creating more than ten thousand paintings and prints in her lifetime. An advocate for artists' economic and working conditions, she was instrumental in founding the Oregon chapter of the Artists Equity Association and served as president of the national Artists Equity. She is "recognized for her outstanding contributions as an educator, studio artist, and arts activist".
Eunice Lulu Parsons, also known as Eunice Jensen Parsons, is an American modernist artist known for her collages. Parsons was born in Loma, Colorado, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Portland Museum Art School, where she also worked as a teacher for over 20 years.
Amanda Viola Snyder, née Tester, was a contemporary American artist from Portland, Oregon. She produced hundreds of drawings, paintings and woodcuts, and held 32 solo exhibitions.
Robert Henry Hess was an American sculptor and art educator. He was best known for his abstract metal sculptures and wood carvings. Hess served on the faculty of Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, for 34 years. Today, his works are found in prominent public spaces and private collections throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Many artworks related to the Black Lives Matter movement were created in Portland, Oregon, United States, during local protests over the murder of George Floyd and other Black Americans. Oregon Arts Watch contextualized the artistic works, stating that a "whitewashed pre-COVID lens" on American life, which obscured systemic racism, had been "cracked", and describing artists' response to racial violence being brought into the public eye was a "marathon, not a sprint".
Otto Fried was a German-born American artist who worked and lived in New York City and Paris.
David John McCosh was a Northwest American artist and art instructor. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art has over 170 of his works in their permanent collection.
