Elizabeth Leach Gallery

05/20/2026

🖇️💡 Our current exhibiting artists, Mark R. Smith and Derek Franklin, have a unique connection.
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Approximately 20 years ago, Smith was Franklin’s art professor at Portland Community College. 🧑🏼‍🎨⏩ Fast forward to now, the two have neighboring exhibitions at the gallery, including “Desert or Ocean” by Smith, and “The Poet’s Lips” by Franklin, featuring new work that includes textile paintings, oil paintings, and sculpture. 🖌️
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These two exhibitions are part of Elizabeth Leach Gallery’s 4️⃣5️⃣th anniversary year programming, demonstrating our long-term, interconnected relationships with artists over the past 45 years! 🤝✨
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🔎👀 Take a step into the archive with us and view select photos of Smith and Franklin’s past exhibitions, as well as installation images from “Desert or Ocean” and “The Poet’s Lips”—both on view through May 30, 2026.

2012
Mark R. Smith
“Vestibules and Portals”

2015 - 2016
Mark R. Smith
“The Silk Road”

2023
Derek Franklin
“Grief is on my calendar every day at 2:00 p.m.”

2023
Mark R. Smith
“Stress Formations”

2025
Derek Franklin
“Between the Time of the Dog and the Wolf”

2026
Mark R. Smith
“Desert or Ocean”

2026
Derek Franklin
“The Poet’s Lips”

05/14/2026

☁️✨Have you experienced Derek Franklin’s dreamlike world of paintings and sculptures yet?

For his current exhibition, “The Poet’s Lips,” has moved away from the darker palette of shadows and turned his focus to the light of too much seeing, ☀️👀💭 overexposure, the startled eye, memory caught in a spotlight mid-formation that then dissipates.

Franklin’s “Theater of Survival” (“TOS”) series of paintings for this exhibition are awash in light, wavering between emergence and erasure, where recognition begins to deliquesce at its edges. “TOS #57” is no different. 🖌️💡 This large-scale painting incorporates a pastel palette, featuring Franklin’s recurring “spotlights” which draw attention to the subject of each work, while obscuring other aspects.

Franklin writes, “I hope to make paintings that are never fully resolute—paintings you can never quite be completely at home with when you are standing in front of them.” 🖼️

What do you see in “TOS #57”? 🫱🏼 Stop by the gallery for a closer look.

TOS #57, 2026
Oil on canvas
84 x 96”

📸 Images by

Sculptures ContemporaryArt ElizabethLeachGallery

05/13/2026

Do This, Do That 👀👉🏼 Thank you to the and .costello for highlighting Mark R. Smith’s current exhibition, “Desert Or Ocean” in their top events for this week!

👕🎨 Through the use of repurposed fabric and acrylic paint, ’s textile paintings in “Desert or Ocean” address looming issues of climate change and environmental displacement.

Specifically, in Smith’s “Meander” series, the dome-like shapes at the top of each composition double as cross-sections of the human brain including its central amygdala, the primary hub for emotional processing. 🧠🌀 Although the pathways wind through color fields evocative of climate extremes, the brain-like domes suggest a collective and meditative destination point, where fear and irrational thinking can also be subject to information and reason. 💡

Stop by the gallery to view these works in person. ⏳”Desert or Ocean” is on view through May 30, 2026.

Meander to Dry, 2026
Repurposed textiles and acrylic paint on canvas panel
59 3/4 x 59 3/4”

Meander to Wet, 2026
Repurposed textiles and acrylic paint on canvas panel
59 3/4 x 59 3/4”

Dense Meander with Riverbed and Canal, 2026
Repurposed textiles on canvas panel
59 3/4 x 59 3/4”

📸 Images by

05/08/2026

05/07/2026

✨ Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present “The Poet’s Lips,” an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Derek Franklin.

Continuing his previous investigations into the visual presentation systems of information and ideas, Franklin has moved away from the darker palette of shadows and turned his focus to the light of too much seeing—overexposure, the startled eye, memory caught in a spotlight mid-formation that then dissipates. The paintings are awash in light, wavering between emergence and erasure, where recognition begins to deliquesce at its edges.

Franklin’s new works offer and then withhold gratification at different distances, slowing down and rendering uncertain the act of looking. Franklin writes, “I hope to make paintings that are never fully resolute—paintings you can never quite be completely at home with when you are standing in front of them.” The paintings hold oppositions instead of resolving them, seeking potential in the ambiguity between oscillating poles: specificity and the pedestrian, hope and anguish, memory and its forgetting. They sustain attention toward the friction between everyday imagery and the fantasy that an image has the possibility of bearing memory.

“The Poet’s Lips” also includes new sculptures by Franklin, “The Songs That Enkidu Would Sing.” Echoing the layers of information and meaning in his paintings, these sculptures are an homage to Brancusi’s The Endless Column, fashioned from cast bronze recorders.

The sculptures reflect the artist’s view that music’s role is not neutral but central to the founding of rituals, fears, and myths—music as seductive, manipulative, solemn, or celebratory: a siren’s lure, the Pied Piper’s call, a harp vigil for passage into the afterlife, Kokopelli’s heralding of spring, and the fear for children’s safety. The column gathers these possibilities into a repeating ascent, where education shades into rebellion and myth into ceremony, all the while maintaining a fidelity to the internal light of the paintings.

☀️👀💭🪈🏛️🎶💫


Images by

05/07/2026

✨ Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present “Desert or Ocean,” an exhibition featuring works by Mark R. Smith.

“Desert or Ocean” features new textile paintings and works on paper for which the subject of climate change and the resulting climate-induced migration serve as a narrative backdrop for the artist’s material investigations and symbolic use of color. In this work Smith continues to investigate the notion of symmetry as a harmonizing element, fashioning linear units of striped fabric into complex interlocking forms and completed rectilinear circuits.

While formally abstract, the work visually references large and small environmental phenomena–meandering rivers, snaking roadways, insect foraging trails, and vast columns of people–to suggest essential movement, questing and/or displacement. This looping and layered imagery also references existing cultural and political polarities in which policy priorities seesaw between competing narratives, as the public at large navigates toward effective solutions to these existential problems.

In the “Meander” series, the dome-like shapes at the top of each composition double as cross-sections of the human brain including its central amygdala, the primary hub for emotional processing. Although the pathways wind through color fields evocative of climate extremes, the brain-like domes suggest a collective and meditative destination point, where fear and irrational thinking can also be subject to information and reason.

Several paintings and works on paper in the exhibition focus exclusively on images of domes, which can be seen as dwellings, colonies, or communities. Inspired by collective human architecture, such as churches or stadiums, these forms also allude to natural domes, both terrestrial and aquatic: insects (ant hills, termite mounds) and sea creatures (reef colonies, rocks with mussels, barnacles).

🛖🏟️🐜🪸🦪🏞️


Images by

05/02/2026

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) presented her first museum exhibition at the Missoula Art Museum (MAM) in 2013. 🎨⏩ Fast forward to today, Siestreem’s current solo exhibition at MAM, “Acts of Love, Refusal, and Resistance” serves as a full-circle moment celebrating the artist’s success and accomplishments over the years. ✨

🎊🙌 The exhibition was marked by an artist’s reception at MAM last night, an artist talk today, and the release of an accompanying exhibition monograph, “Sara Siestreem: Acts of Love, Refusal, and Resistance.” The title comes directly from Siestreem’s own description of her work as pieces that “safeguard their own stories [as] an act of love, refusal, and resistance.”

Browse a selection of pieces from “Acts of Love, Refusal, and Resistance,” and stop by the gallery to see more of Siestreem’s available works from our collection. 🖼️




starry-starry-night, over a temporary régime, 2025
acrylic, graphite, color pencil, Xerox transfer on panel boards
80 x 200”

dance apron, 2025
acrylic, graphite, color pencil, Xerox transfer on panel boards
80 x 200”

blue skies smilin’ at me, 2025
glazed slip cast ceramic dance cap with gold, Czech White Heart beads
5 of 5, 2 APs

3/15/2020 minion, 2024
Four glazed slip cast ceramic dance caps, Abalone, plastic buttons, Czech white heart beads, Indigo dyed cotton, canvas and thread
approx:
72 x 8 x 11” each
72 x 92 x 11” overall

button basket, 2024
glazed slip cast ceramic basket, acrylic paint and Xerox transfer
8.75 x 8.25 x 8”

last years blues clam basket, 2022-2024
Spruce root (Nehalem, OR), Japanese Indigo (Linton) dye
9 x 8 x 8”

facing widespread opposition pembina withdraws application to oregon department of state lands to create an ecological disaster in Jordan Cove, Coos Bay January 23, 2020, 2020
acrylic, colored pencil & graphite on paper
70 x 42” paper
76 x 47” framed

Eagle Machine: dancing - - - - - - - the beautiful, 2017
acrylic, graphite, Xerox transfer on panel, Cotton Wood Bark (Wapato Island, OR) woven dance skirt
120 x 120”

05/01/2026

✨ Tomorrow is the final day to see “sense of place.”

Across media, this group show explores the many meanings of place, 🌏🔎 from the American landscape to interiors, invented places, and political situations that reflect on where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

🫶🌟 Special thanks the 17 artists who participated in “sense of place,” curated as part of the gallery’s 45th Anniversary year. We look forward to sharing more about our upcoming programming in celebration of this exciting milestone! 🎊





Shannon Ebner

Richard Gruetter











👋 Stop by during our open hours to learn more.
⏰ Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30 am - 5:30 pm

04/29/2026

👏🗣️ Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of several artworks by Ed Bereal for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

successfully launched his career in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, however, following the Watts Rebellion in 1965, he began to distance himself from the art world. At that time, Bereal focused his attention on social justice activism—founding the noted Black street theater, the Bodacious Buggerilla, and traveling internationally as a film journalist. 🎭🎥

In the 1990s, Bereal recommitted to a studio practice, striving to make social and economic injustices visible through his work. ✍🏾 Specifically, the acquired pieces by the and highlight the artist’s ongoing practice of drawing, including several works from his notable “Miss America” series. ✨

Congratulations to Ed Bereal on this exciting milestone and his continued impact on the greater arts community! 🎉

Stop by the gallery to view additional works by Bereal—we’re open Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30 am - 5:30 pm.

🏛️ Acquired by :

Gargoyles, 1992
graphite on paper
22.5 x 24.75” framed

🏛️ Acquired by :

Lost in the U.S.A./Self Portrait, 1999
mixed media on paper
26.5 x 22” framed

Miss America, 1990
graphite on paper
24.5 x 18.5” framed

One Nation Under God Inc., 1999
graphite and collage on paper
39 x 38” framed

04/28/2026

⏳👀 It’s the final week to see “sense of place”! ➡️ This group exhibition of 17 artists explores specific locations to larger conceptual ideas of what makes a “place,” including two photographs by artist and photographer .
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🎞️ For two years, Kurland traveled throughout the American West, exploring what remains of our commercial railway system. 📸🚂 She not only photographed trains winding through the landscape, but also the train-hoppers and subculture of people who ride the rails—as seen in “Land of the Lost” and “Heroic Cave Portrait.”
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Stop by this week to view Kurland’s photographs, which offer a unique perspective on the romanticism and utopian fantasies woven into the American experience. 🛤️✨

🗓️ “sense of place” is on view through May 2, 2026.

Land of the Lost, 2008
c-print
19 x 23”
48.3 x 58.4 cm.
Edition 1/6

Heroic Cave Portrait, Santa Cruz, 2008
c-print
18 x 23.5” image
18.75 x 24.25” framed
Edition 1/6