A recent article published in PORTRAIT Portland—covering the development of Nike Chief Design Officer John Hoke’s family home—includes works by gallery artists Michael Brophy and Michele Russo.
Northwest artist 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. 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; the Multnomah County Courthouse, Portland, OR; the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in Wasco, OR; and Mt. Rainier High School in Des Moines, WA. Recent exhibitions include 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘢𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘚𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 and 𝘖𝘯 𝘌𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩: 𝘈 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘌𝘹𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 at Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; and the traveling exhibition 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘞𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘴: 𝘈𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘴 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘦 𝘢𝘯 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘢.
Michele Russo made significant contributions to the Northwest throughout his life. After graduating from Yale in 1934 and marrying fellow artist Sally Haley, he arrived in Portland in 1947. He taught at the Pacific Northwest College of Art for over 25 years and became an active advocate for the arts during the politically charged 1950s. He was a founder of the Portland Center for the Visual Arts and was the first artist appointed to the Metropolitan Arts Commission in the 1970s. Throughout his career, Michele Russo’s work has been in major exhibitions nationally and is in many public and private collections. Russo was honored with a fifty-year retrospective at the Portland Art Museum in 1988.