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While Portland has grown into an arts destination (you don’t even have to leave the airport to be impressed), the city’s influence is expansive. Here are six artists with Portland connections all doing interesting things. We hope they inspire you to resolve to have—and perhaps make!—more art experiences yourself.
Tina Satter
A 2017 article about the FBI interrogation of Reality Winner, the former NSA translator who leaked documents about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to the media, sparked something in Tina Satter. She made a Freedom of Information Act request for the interview transcript (a skill you learn when you spend time at WW, which she did at the turn of the century) and was inspired to turn the words into Is This a Room, a play that made it to Broadway in 2021. Two years later, Satter adapted her play into Reality, a feature film starring Sydney Sweeney that earned a rave reviews and a 2024 Peabody Award.
Karen Karbo
It sounds like the plot of a Nora Ephron film: Writer leaves America to move to a small town in France, gets stuck because of a pandemic, and finds adventure, a new love and satisfying work. In truth, Karen Karbo went to the South of France in 2019 with her partner in tow, but you get the idea. She’s certainly got the writing chops to gussy up her own story. During her nearly 20 years in Portland, Karbo published 14 books, including the bestselling Kick-Ass Women series. She now leads small writing retreats in the impossibly charming-sounding Collioure with special guests like Portlanders Chelsea Cain and Cheryl Strayed.
Mickalene Thomas
Though born in New Jersey, Mickalene Thomas spent time in Portland in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, including a stint as a barista at the Pioneer Courthouse Square Starbucks. It was here that she first saw an exhibition of African American photographer Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series, an inspiring force behind Thomas’ phenomenal art career. From Portland, she studied at the Pratt Institute and Yale, and has become a significant contemporary artist, working in a variety of mediums as she focuses on the beauty and power of the Black female experience. Her work is now represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
Scott Prendergast
An eighth-generation Oregonian and graduate of Wilson High (now Ida B. Wells), writer and actor Scott Prendergast may be recognized most for his regular appearances on HBO sitcom Silicon Valley, but he found legions of devoted fans via So Help Me Todd, the comedy he created for CBS that ran for two seasons (2022-2024). Now living in LA, Prendergast is hard at work developing a new show.
Nalini “Deedee” Cheriel
Raised in Eugene, Deedee Cheriel lived in Portland in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, running her own record label and playing in the band Adickdid. (The 2001 film Down and Out With the Dolls was inspired by her time in that riot grrrl group.) Since moving to LA, Cheriel has found success as a visual artist, showcasing her Northwest influences (punk rock, the natural environment) and using animals provocatively in her paintings to represent human emotions.
Coco Corral
Many artists share an enthusiasm for making big changes and bold statements. Coco Corral has demonstrated that in many ways, including her name. In her mid 20s, while living in Portland, she realized the world had plenty of Jennifers (her given name) and decided “Coco” fit better with her intense and complicated style. That spirit extends to the name of her Biddleford, Maine-based jewelry business, Loving Anvil. With hammer and torch, she molds fine metals and gemstones, bringing beauty, order and fascination in tiny frameworks. Elegant hoop earrings that read “Fuck This” and “Fuck That” in handstamped letters were her best sellers in 2020. The new option, entirely appropriate for 2024 are “Lover” and “Fighter.” Or necklaces that read, “Do No Harm, Take No Shit,” which is about as solid a motto as I can think of.