Ka'ila Farrell-Smith (Klamath, Modoc), 2021 Hallie Ford Fellow

Ka'ila Farrell-Smith relocated to her Southern Oregon ancestral homelands near Modoc Point to recenter place and decolonial freedom into her art and life. The daily practices of working and harvesting from the land allow her to gather found objects, such as bullets, discarded metal, and machine parts to use as stencils in her paintings.
Farrell-Smith’s work has been recently been included in exhibitions at Ditch Projects, Springfield, Oregon; the Portland Art Museum and the Portland2019 Biennial at Oregon Contemporary (formerly DisjectaContemporary Art Center) in Portland, Oregon; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon; the High Desert Museum of Art, Bend, Oregon; and Linfield Gallery, McMinnville, Oregon; as well as the Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington and Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Portland State University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Farrell-Smith is a 2019-2020 Fields Fellow with the Oregon Community Foundation.
Learn more about Ka'ila Farrell-Smith, their work and The Ford Family Foundation’s Visual Arts Program at tfff.org.
Hallie Ford Fellowships in the Visual Arts honor the legacy of the late Hallie E. Ford, co-founder of The Ford Family Foundation, who had a lifelong interest in supporting the visual arts. The Foundation awards up to three $35,000 unrestricted fellowships to Oregon visual artists who have demonstrated a depth of sophisticated practice and potential for significant future accomplishment.