Margot Voorhies Thompson
This exhibition by Margot Voorhies Thompson, entitled Stencils and Graphics has been guided by her thoughts about the power of oral and written language to express human hopes as well as to sometimes suppress freedom and opportunity. Her newest paintings and collages range in scale from the modest, reflecting on letters and intimate communication, to very large scale canvases, echoing billboards and urban graffiti. Thompson’s artistic motivation for this show has been spurred by social and political tumult in countries around the world, where the masses seek to express their desires, and governments respond with various degrees of accommodation and suppression. She utilizes her longstanding formal and abstract visual language of calligraphed shapes and intersecting forms to reflect on the linguistic and expressive evolution of the complex world around us.
A Portland native, Margot Voorhies Thompson studied at Lewis and Clark College, Reed College, the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and at the Hochschule Fur Kunsterlische in Linz, Austria. Her work is in collections including the Portland Art Museum, the Stanford University Hospital, and the Printmaking Workshop in New York. Margot Thompson has completed several collaborative book commissions with Kim Stafford, Pattian Rogers, and Wendell Berry for the University of Oregon’s Knight Library Press. Other commissions include pieces for Oregon University of Health and Sciences, Portland; Portland State University; Kaiser Permanente, Tualatin, OR; the Woodstock Branch Multnomah County Library; and Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, both in Portland. Recently she completed a commission for the Oregon State Hospital in Salem.