Stumptown Coffee Roasters is pleased to announce the late Carola Penn as a recipient of its
Artist Fellowship program. The award honors Penn’s vibrant work and will go towards archiving
her prolific oeuvre and preserving her legacy. Paintings selected from her two series,
Compartments and Interiors/Exteriors are on view at the Downtown cafe through July 21, 2021.

There will be a closing reception on Friday, June 18th from 5–7 pm

Fragments focus specifically on Penn’s use of collage and irregular shapes to record the
psychological, physical, and political disparities she found in urban settings. These seemingly
incomplete or fragmented pieces—some shown here for the first time—were also a way for
Penn to break free of the square canvas frame. Inhabited by myths, dreams, and references to
the work of other painters, this body of work illustrate Penn’s radical contribution to
Portland’s visual arts ecology of the past four decades. Alongside her contemporaries Michael
Brophy and Lucinda Parker, Penn paved the way for today’s active painting scene in our city.

Carola Penn (1945–2019) was a leading NW artist whose paintings were rooted in landscapes
both personal and political. Educated in the 1960s at UC Berkeley, Penn was involved in the Free
Speech and Civil Rights Movements and studied art under leading mid-century artist Elmer
Bischoff. In 1969, Penn and her husband, Dennis Anderson, decided to move to Canada. En route,
they stopped in Portland and never left. Penn graduated from Pacific Northwest College of Art
(PNCA) in 1986 and spent the rest of her life dedicating her days to painting.

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