Pat Boas

ARTIST BIO

Pat Boas makes drawings, paintings, prints and digital projects about the activity of reading. Boas work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, the Art Gym, and Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland; the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe; the Boise Art Museum; the Salt Lake Art Center; the Nicolaysen Museum in Casper, WY; the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle and the Cleveland Museum of Art. The artist is the recipient of honors, fellowships, grants and residencies from the Bonnie Bronson Fund, Caldera Arts Foundation, the Ford Family Foundation, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, Jentel Foundation, Oregon College of Arts and Craft, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Portland Art Museum, and Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council, among others. Boas is an associate professor and Director of the School of Art + Design at Portland State University.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My recent work plays with the form, movement and sound‐sense of words. I start with phrases read or heard and build paintings, drawings and prints from the letterforms: piling up, reversing, fragmenting or filling them in. Though it comes from the associative qualities of particular words, the work is not meant to be deciphered — something like Richard Tuttle’s “Letters” (1967), with each one “using itself, not depicting.” I aim to make surfaces that echo the intimacy of handwriting, the peculiarity of display type and the exuberance of graffiti while jostling the strange act of silent reading with the noise of color and form.