Samantha Wall
For the month of September, the Russo Lee Gallery will present Phantom Limbs by gallery artist Samantha Wall. Phantom Limbs is an exploration of family identity, cultural history, and loss. The drawing exhibition interweaves portraiture with Korean ritual narratives, summoning the past in order to decipher the present.
Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Samantha Wall immigrated to the United States as a child. She received her BFA from The University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, and her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR. Her work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions regionally and nationally. Wall is the recipient of awards and grants from organizations including the Oregon Arts Commission; Portland, Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council; The Ford Family Foundation; and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. She was also a semi-finalist for the Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Art Awards 2016 and the winner of the Arlene Schnitzer Prize.
The PDX Art Program is honored to present In the Wake, a spectacular ten-panel site-specific installation by acclaimed Portland artist Samantha Wall, currently on view post-security overhead within Concourse D at PDX. These compelling large-scale artworks of ink on Dura-Lar are an exploration into Wall’s family identity, cultural history, and loss. The drawings are inspired by Korean ritual narratives of cleansing and healing and will be on view for one full year, through March of 2020.
Lisa Jarrett, Melanie Stevens, and Samantha Wall created three simultaneous exhibitions as a singular gesture. Their themes—the racialized body, the poetry in its cultural tells, and the wit required to endure criticism—disrupted Portland’s oft ubiquitous fall exhibition calendar.
Visual artist Samantha Wall leads Artslandia through her creative process and shares insight on her sources of inspiration and hope.