Oregon artist Sherrie Wolf brings life to still life in Pendleton exhibition
Published 3:40 pm Thursday, August 21, 2025
PENDLETON — Oregon Artist Sherrie Wolf’s latest exhibition of bold colors, vivid details and large-scale still life paintings opens Thursday, Aug. 21, at the Pendleton Center for the Arts.
Wolf will attend the opening reception 5:30-7 p.m. at the center at 214 N. Main St. The event is free and open to the public.
Arts center Executive Director Roberta Lavadour described Wolf as a “masterful painter,” praising the bold scale and layered symbolism of the artist’s work.
“These pieces are big and bold, but they also have incredible depth,” Lavadour said. “There’s so much symbolism, art history references and other elements. You could sit in front of one for half an hour and just explore.”
The exhibition features works from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation. It marks the center’s eighth collaboration with the foundation and its first showcasing of an Oregon artist.
“This work raises so many questions — how does she do it? Is she painting from life? How does she choose her subjects?” Lavadour said. “It’ll be great to have her here to talk about her process, because this is the kind of work that really makes you wonder.”
She added the artist has developed a rich visual vocabulary and often writes about the layered meanings in her work.
Wolf has said as a college student in San Francisco she saw a retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work, and the proved to be a major influence on her.
“Her huge, boldly beautiful still-life images inspired my belief in a life as a successful woman painter,” Wolf said. “Around then, historians began revealing many women artists that had been overlooked throughout history … There could be concern that beautiful, large-scale images of tea cups, tulips and other ‘feminine identified objects’ might cast me as a dilettante who paints pretty pictures. I am undaunted by this, with O’Keeffe at my back.”
Wolf was born in Portland, where she continues to live and paint. She earned a bachelors of fine arts in painting from the Museum Art School, now Pacific Northwest College of Art, and later received a master of arts in printmaking from Chelsea College of Art in London.
A coffee table book featuring a retrospective of her work will be available for purchase during the exhibition.
The exhibition runs through Oct. 31 at the Pendleton Center for the Arts.
