Pacific Northwest College of Art    Portland, OR

Nan Curtis Named 2012 Bonnie Bronson Fellow

Faculty member Nan Curtis was recently awarded the 20th Annual Bonnie Bronson Fellowship Award, funded through the Bonnie Bronson Fund of The Oregon Community Foundation. The prestigious award carries a prize of $7,500 and includes the purchase of artwork for the permanent collection of the Foundation. As part of the award’s 20th anniversary, Curtis will be included in a retrospective exhibition in September at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery at Lewis and Clark College, featuring all 20 artists with an accompanying catalog.

From the press release:

“Nan Curtis is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and independent curator based in Portland. Her recent work explores ideas about collections, memory, home, place, family, childhood, and social relationships. She often features simple domestic objects with personal associations, slightly altering or re-combining them, or having viewers interact with them, to make poignant and provocative observations of human habits. Her most recent exhibition in January at Portland’s Nine Gallery featured a series of “rekindled” collections, both her own and others’, where she reconfigured personal collections of objects in ways that humorously, and empathetically, focused on human predilections for idiosyncratic collecting, as well as on the possibilities of looking at familiar items in new and surprising ways.

“Nan Curtis is an assistant professor of sculpture and 3-D design at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in Portland, where she has taught for 16 years. She was the Feldman Gallery + Project Space director and curator at PNCA from 2000–2006, as well as chair of the sculpture department during the same period. She is known as a strong student advocate and mentor, committed to building intellectual understanding, trust, and confident risk-taking in the classroom. Curtis also has a reputation for instigating fresh and meaningful exhibitions in her role as a curator, and is credited with raising the quality and purpose of the Feldman Gallery at PNCA to levels that more fully engage both the academic and public audiences.”

Watch Nan Curtis’ faculty profile video.

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