CAROLA PENN

Fragments

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 will be on view at the Downtown café from March 12th through April 29th, 2020, with a catered reception on Wednesday, March 18th (5–7pm).

Fragments focuses 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 illustrates 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. Her vibrant work is being honored in three different venues this spring: Woodlands, as part of the PDX Rotating Art Program at PDX Airport; Who Am I, Anyway? at Nationale; and Fragments, as part of the Stumptown Artist Fellowship Program at Stumptown Downtown.