Winter 2024 RESIDENT: Stephen Hayes

Throughout his career, Stephen Hayes has explored themes of the land, loss, sexuality, identity, beauty, and violence. No matter the subject, his works exude an authenticity and depth of understanding that belie their seeming nonchalance of execution or familiarity of imagery. In a career now in its fourth decade, Hayes has held over thirty-five solo exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. His works have been curated into nearly seventy group shows by a broad diversity of curatorial voices, among whom are: Kristy Edmunds, Cassandra Coblentz, Stuart Horodner, Linda Tesner, Bruce Guenther, Terri Hopkins, John Weber, Peter Frank, Willem de Looper, and Mary Jane Jacob. Exhibitions of his paintings, prints and drawings have been reviewed in Art Forum  by Stephanie Snyder, in Art in America by Sue Taylor, in Artweek by Lois Allan and by Paul Sutinen for Oregon Arts Watch. He is a featured artist in Lois Allan’s comprehensive Contemporary Printmaking in the Northwest as well as Lauren P. Della Monica’s Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views and New American Paintings Number 121, curated by Nina Bozicnik.

SPRING 2024 RESIDENT: DEMIAN Dinéyazyi'

Demian DinéYazhi' is a Portland-based Diné transdisciplinary artist, poet, and curator born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) & Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. DinéYazhi ́'s praxis interrogates normative spaces by refusing to settle or perform for exploitative galleries and publishers that act as gatekeepers to the lethargic, toxic legacy of Western paradigms. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.

2023 RESIDENT: Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971 in Chicago, Illinois) produces sculptural installations, assemblages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics that often transform everyday household objects. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH (2016); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2014); the Hepworth Wakefield Museum (2013); the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA (2011). Significant group exhibitions include Makeshift at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, where Hutchins first premiered her performance work; the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace (2013); and The Whitney Biennial (2010). Her work has been incorporated into public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland. Hutchins holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

2023 RESIDENT: Storm Tharp

A lifelong Oregon resident currently living and working in Portland, Storm Tharp has generated international attention for his work, with exhibitions and gallery representation in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. A selection of Tharp’s paintings recently was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, a high-profile exhibition of American contemporary artwork, often highlighting young and emerging artists. That show is put on once every two years by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

A practitioner of several media—including ink and gouache painting, sculpture installation and clothing design—much of Tharp’s work explores themes of character and identity. Some of his acclaimed portraits—often a stylistic mixture of blotted ink and sharply defined contours—exhibit a delicate balance of realistic and abstract expression.