2023 Artists
Arielle Brackett is a metalsmith and mixed media artist based in Portland, OR. She received her BFA in metals at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2017. Brackett makes her living teaching metalsmithing and fiber arts classes at Multnomah Art Center, Ninety Twenty Studios, Wildcraft, and Sitka Center. Brackett was awarded best in metals at the Colorado Gallery of the Arts in Littleton, CO, and the Art Center of Estes Park in Estes Park, CO, and Juror’s Choice Award in Jewelry from CraftForms 2021. She has participated twice in Romania Jewelry Week and once in NYC Jewelry Week.
Brackett has shown nationally at; the Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, Baltimore Jewelry Center in Baltimore, MD, Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston, MA, Gallery Twenty Fifty Two in Chicago, IL, Ann Marie Garden in Solomons, MD, Portland Winter Light Festival, Portland, OR, Wayne Art Center in Wayne, PA, Danaca Design Gallery in Seattle, WA, InLiquid Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, Pocosin Art Center in Columbia, NC, Patterson-Appleton Art Center in Denton, TX, Edwardsville Art Center in Edwardsville, IL, Left Bank Annex in Portland, OR, Ton Pottery Gallery in Pittsburg, PA, and The Art Center of Estes Park in Estes Park, CO.
Brackett has shown work internationally at; Craft Council of British Columbia in Canada; Arcub Gabroveni and National Library of Romania in Romania; Winzavod Contemporary Art Center and at the Museum of Stone-cutting and Jewelry Art both in Russia.
She has received scholarships in Le Barroux, France, in Grand Junction, Colorado, at the Penland School of Craft, and for a collaborative project, Frogwood (2021, 2023). Brackett has been published in numerous books, magazines, and online platforms. Brackett has a 2023 Sou’wester Art residency.
Pacific Northwest-based artists Santigie Fofana-Dura and Sapata Fofana-Dura are brothers, art partners, and collaborators. Over the past several years, they have created a plethora of architectural sculptures for gallery exhibitions as well as set designs for live music performances. The brothers design, create and build work using salvaged timber as well as steel, aluminum, and other discarded construction materials. With an innate passion for the ‘Storyteller’ the brothers construct shrines paying homage to the past while being uniquely invented for present and future myth-making. Their current solo exhibition ‘Door’ is at the Souvenir Gallery in Portland, OR until April 1, 2023.
Transplanted from New York, Adia Gibbs is a graduate of Parsons School of Design, has been living in Oregon for several plus years, and is a Portland-based visual artist pursuing an MFA at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Adia is the ethereal timekeeper of memories, whose illustrative assemblages reflect her longing to connect with her ancestors and those who came before. The concept of her work is the excavation and preservation of the past. She weaves a story incorporating woven textiles and organic matter with china or vintage tools of domesticity and carpentry.
Adia’s aesthetic combines organic and manufactured materials and conditioning them to look eroded by time and overtaken by nature, because erosion and decay, are the time stamps of life. There is a methodical pleasure she takes in the process of corrosion of everyday objects. The act of rusting metal, aging wood, staining crocheted lace with tea, and imbuing old sepia photographs as transparencies onto thin china or old apothecary bottles, makes her feel like she is connecting with the person who would have used these everyday items. When on the search for these pieces, sometimes Adia will hold on to an article and energetically get a feeling to either collect or buy it even if she hasn’t discovered what its purpose will be yet. Being inspired by found objects serves as a springboard for dialogue, connection, and research that enrich Adia and her creative spirit. This is the gift of the symbiotic process between her art and the finished piece.
Diego Morales-Portillo (1992) is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer originally from Guatemala, living and working in Portland, Oregon.
Morales-Portillo graduated as a bachelor in artistic drawing at the National School of Fine Arts of Guatemala in 2010, in 2015 he received a Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design and Advertising with a Cum Laude degree from the Universidad del Istmo. In 2017 Diego migrated to the US, in 2019 he received the degree of Master's MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. Morales-Portillo has presented his work in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Italy, North Korea, Spain and the United States in exhibitions such as 2017 Pacific Standard Time LA/LA; Mapping Narratives: New Prints 2021/Winter at the International Print Center in NY (2021); auction and exhibition of Latin American art Juannio 2013, 2016, 2017, 2020. His work is in public collections such as Neo-Murales of the Rozas Botran Foundation and Imago Mundi of Luciano Benneton in Italy and Portable Works collection of the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) in Portland, Oregon.
Diego had been selected for artistic residencies such as The Studios at MASS MoCA, Caldera Art residency, Leland Iron Works and Haystack Mountain School of Craft. Among other awards received by Morales-Portillo worth mention the 2nd place in the 2017 Auction of Latin American Art Juannio, a Full Fellowship at MASS MoCA sponsored by the Ford Family Foundation, Precipice Fund by PICA and The Andy Warhol Foundation; and Support Beam grant by RACC in 2020.
Nathaniel C. Praska (b. 1985, Portland, OR) uses his background as a traditional landscape painter, creating layered pieces while also treating them with an immediacy like that of someone scrawling on a wall under an interstate bridge. Praska embraces the detritus of the abandoned places in his environment and transmogrifies what’s found there to communicate oblique signifiers or direct symbols that reflect anxiety, absurdity, isolation, and paranoia. Linked with these aspects, Praska renders quotidian objects and monstrous analogies, developing a visual vocabulary for both the emergent understanding concerning the diseases of despair and the precarity of the post-1980s socio-economic paradigm. Praska has received grants and residencies from the Calligram Foundation, the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and Rockland Woods and has exhibited his work throughout the United States. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.