Linda K. Johnson is a cross-disciplinary, dance-based artist living in Portland, Oregon. She has taught, performed, created and produced extensively throughout the region for over 20 years. Her concerns as an artist are social and environmental, and her 15+ large-scale projects have consistently addressed these interests in hybrid and unconventional forms, formats and venues. Her work is informed by her long-standing interest in visual art, improvisation, jazz music, architecture, horticulture and sustainable stewardship of place. An Oregon Artist Fellow in 1999, her work has been generously funded by public, private and individual sources, and has received serious critical review in many venues including Metropolis Magazine, Living on Earth/NPR and the Core Sample catalogue. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, Sitka and Caldera, and is honored to be a custodian in perpetuity of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal post-modern work, Trio A. Recent projects include the development of an interdisciplinary artist in residence program in the new South Waterfront district in Portland, OR (www.southwaterfront.com/art_and_design/artist), and the groundbreaking performance event - The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, honoring the Halprin's legacy in Portland (www.thirdangle.org). Contact: lkjdance@earthlink.net
Stephen Hayes was born and raised in Washington D.C. where his earliest memory of an interest in art is of a drawing he made with silver crayons of John Glenn and his “Rocket Ship” in 1960 something. He was about six.
The mature artist, Stephen Hayes, received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1980, having focused on drawing and specifically on drawing the human form. His studies took him as far as a full dissection of the cadaver via the University Medical School, culminating in a thesis on portraiture.
Immediately following graduate school, Hayes moved to the Middle East for nearly four years where he was overwhelmed by the awesome beauty of the Cypriot landscape. It was there that his interest in the land as a vehicle for expression of human condition began. His travels and work in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain and Cyprus planted a seed that is still bearing fruit in his work today. While his landscape paintings are rarely populated, there is always the sense that we have knowledge of the place, or the mood, or the potency of place. This quality is a result of years spent walking alone through natural and often rugged beauty and drinking that quality in to the core.
In 1984 Hayes moved first back to Washington for a brief stint at the Phillips Collection as one of their Museum Assistants, and then within six months decided to go somewhere unknown. He headed west and settled in Portland, Oregon where he currently lives. He continues through his painting and print work, to translate, viscerally, the physical and emotional experience of places of nature. In the roughly 20 years that Hayes has spent working and teaching in Portland he has participated in scores of exhibitions and produced dozens of one-man shows of his paintings, prints and drawings. His work is well represented in numerous private, public and corporate collections throughout the United States, as well as in Europe, Japan and South America. He can be reached through the Elizabeth Leach Gallery at www.elizabethleach.com
