Nine Women Artists

Nine Women Artists is on at the Portland Art Museum from June 20, 2026, through February 21, 2027. The whole show grows out of a single painting, 9 Portraits, an epic group portrait of nine Northwest artists painted by Katherine Ace in 2019. Ace, who died in 2023, came up with the idea after noticing in 2015 that a group portrait of women artist colleagues was missing from the painting canon. She asked her subjects to dress in their studio clothes and paint-splattered aprons—a pointed counterpoint to Henri Fantin-Latour's 1870 A Studio at Les Batignolles, which shows a formal gathering of male artists in suits. The nine women are all long-career Portland artists: Laura Ross-Paul, Mary Josephson, Judy Cooke, Phyllis Yes, Sharon Bronzan, Shu-Ju Wang, Lucinda Parker, and Sherrie Wolf, with Ace's own self-portrait seated with a phone. The museum hangs work by each woman alongside the portrait, so it ends up as a survey of Portland art from the end of the 20th century to the present.

Ace worked in alkyd and oil on canvas and was represented by galleries like Woodside/Braseth in Seattle and Bronze Coast in Cannon Beach. The exhibition is at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave, and admission is included with general admission.