Rainen Knecht, 2021 Hallie Ford Fellow

Employing a form of dream logic, Rainen Knecht examines beauty, humor, and horror. Her femme figures are, as she describes, “situated between a warrior princess and sturdy milkmaid.” Clawed and distorted, they enact art historical motifs imbued with mischievous agency. In recent work, Knecht, a new mother, has studied the mother and child figure intertwined. The massive upheaval of becoming a mother, paired with the experience of witnessing her own mother’s death of cancer, is a centering gravity in Knecht’s paintings.
Knecht studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2006. Her exhibition history includes solo and two-person exhibitions at Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon; SITUATIONS, New York, New York; and CAPITAL, San Francisco, California, as well as recent group exhibitions at Shulamit. Nazarian and Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, California; Fisher Parrish, Brooklyn, New York; Stems Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; Ditch Projects, Springfield, Oregon; and PMOMA, Portland, Oregon.
Learn more about Rainen Knecht, 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.