On view February 1 – April 27, 2025
In 2017 painter Michael Brophy visited the decommissioned nuclear production complex at Hanford, Washington. He observed its B Reactor, the world’s first full-scale plutonium-producing reactor, the former townsites and remnants of the area closed off when Hanford’s facilities were established by the U.S. Government in 1943, and a landscape forever changed. In a reference to the site’s nine nuclear reactors, now offline and cocooned in concrete, Brophy made nine paintings to document and process his experience and bring this history to light. Named after the Hanford Reach, a 51-mile section of the Columbia River along the area’s northeast border, Brophy’s series title conflates this geographical term with the philosophical and ethical implications of a complicated legacy. The 580-square-mile site remains one of the most polluted places in North America after thirty years of ongoing environmental cleanup.
Reach: The Hanford Series will fill the museum’s Schnitzer Gallery and will be the first solo exhibition at the JSMA by Brophy, long one of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent painters. It continues what the artist calls his “Northwest Ethos” – a long-held commitment to examining the region’s history of exploration and settlement, and the relationship of its native peoples, historical settlers, and contemporary residents to the natural and increasingly urban world. In the fall of 2023 Brophy’s work was included in Many Wests, Artists Shape an American Idea, and in 2020 his work was on view in On Earth, A Fragile Existence, featuring works in the JSMA’s collection.