HOST NORA ROBERTSON WITH MICHAEL BROPHY, STEPHANIE SNYDER AND SHAWNA GORE NOVEMBER 11TH, 2009
The New Oregon Interview Series brought three prominent Portland art makers together for an evening of intimate conversation. Painter Michael Brophy, Cooley Gallery director Stephanie Snyder and Dark Horse Comics editor Shawna Gore sat down to discuss their work and how our visual art culture is evolving on November 11th at Urban Grind East. Collected by the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum and Microsoft, Brophy’s work was the subject of a Tacoma Art Museum exhibition, “The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy”, and appeared in their recent 9th Northwest Biennial. A 2007 Getty Foundation Fellow, Snyder is the director/curator of the Cooley Gallery at Reed and has co-hosted the Back Room discussion series. An editor at Dark Horse since 2003, Gore’s work on the CREEPY Archives and the Herbie Archives hardcover series earned her two 2009 Eisner Awards. Host Nora Robertson conceived the New Oregon Interview Series to find out how Portland’s blossoming creative culture has developed and where it’s headed. “A lot has changed in the past decade,” Robertson says. “The best perspective comes from the artists themselves—and the designers, writers, chefs, and venues who make things happen here.” “A lot has changed in the past decade,” Robertson says. “The best perspective comes from the artists themselves—and the designers, writers, chefs, and venues who make things happen here.” The Oregonian’s Barry Johnson remarked “at this point, we don’t know whether we’re headed back where we left off 18 months ago or whether we’re going somewhere completely new. That question is at the center of the New Oregon Interview Series.” The New Oregon Interview Series is presented by New Oregon Arts and Letters, a 501c(3) nonprofit organization formerly known as 2GQ, the publishers of 2 Gyrlz Quarterly.
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A native Oregonian, Michael Brophy’s paintings are truly indigenous to the Pacific Northwest. His grand-scale oil paintings pay homage to Oregon’s natural landscape, ranging from the coast to the mountains to the desert, exploring nature on its own terms, as well as in the ways it intersects with human experience. Brophy’s work is heroic in scale, poignant in content, and shows great virtuosity of technique. Michael Brophy graduated in 1985 from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he has also taught. He has shown extensively in the Northwest in both solo and group exhibitions. Most recently he was included in the Tacoma Art Museum’s 9th Northwest Biennial. In 2005, he was honored with an exhibition, “The Romantic Vision of Michael Brophy,” by the Tacoma Art Museum and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University. He is a recipient of multiple honors including a NEA Westaf Grant, a Pollock Krasner Grant, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. His work is in collections including Microsoft, the Multnomah County Library Collection, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, OSU Library in Corvallis, and the City of Portland, OR. Public commissions include Portland’s City Hall and the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in Wasco, OR. Currently he is working on a commission for Mount Rainier High School, through the Washington State Arts Commission.
Courtesy of Laura Russo Gallery
Stephanie Snyder is the Anne and John Hauberg director and curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. Snyder’s curatorial projects at the Cooley Gallery include: China Urban, (2009, with co-curator Lisa Claypool); Liza Ryan, SPILL (2009); David Reed, Lives of Paintings (2008); suddenly: where we live now (2008, traveling); Working History: African American Objects (2008); Marko Lulic / Peter Kreider (2007, with co-curator Kristan Kennedy); Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong (2006); New Trajectories I and II: Recent Work from the Ovitz Family Collection, Los Angeles (2006); Mona Hatoum (2005); and Snapshot Chronicles: the Rise of the American Photo Album (2005, with co-curator Barbara Levine, traveling). Snyder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College in 1991, and completed her EdM at Columbia University in 1998. Upon graduating from Reed, she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to live and conduct research in Athens, Greece. She was appointed director of the Cooley Gallery in 2003. Snyder is the recipient of a 2007 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation in order to pursue her research on artist Daniel Spoerri. She is currently finishing her PhD in Art History at the University of the Arts, London. Snyder lives in Portland, Oregon with her son Theo and husband, Jonathan. She relishes the pleasures of writing, and creating space for unstructured time, Jewish ritual, and meditation.
READ MORE Suddenly “‘suddenly: where we live now’ at the Pomona College Museum of Art”, Afterall “Just Across That Stand of Trees: Lake Burien, Posters, Hooch, Google Earth, and How to Make Art of Land”, The Stranger
Shawna Gore joined the staff of Dark Horse Comics in 1997 and has been an editor of comic-books, graphic novels, and art books for the independent publisher since 2003. Originally hired as the company’s first publicist, Shawna briefly left Dark Horse in 2002 to explore PR work in the music industry—before she came to her senses and realized she was burned-out on marketing, not on comic-books. Happily for all involved, Shawna was quickly re-hired as an editor by Dark Horse, where she has played a key role in building the company’s highly-acclaimed horror line of comics and books, as well as taking on many other genres. Today Shawna’s editorial schedule includes a variety of horror titles, Emily the Strange projects, an upcoming series with filmmaker Zak Penn, Too Much Coffee Man, and art books from pinup master Jim Silke. This summer Shawna’s work on the CREEPY Archives and the Herbie Archives hardcover series earned her two Eisner Awards—the comics industry’s equivalent of the Oscar. In addition to her work in comics, Shawna is an occasional writer, a longtime drummer, an avid cyclist, a compulsive crafter, a creator of bizarre baking art, and a friend to animals. She lives in Northeast Portland with her husband, Ian, two cats, and two rabbits.
Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics
