Still, They Speak: Paintings by Don Bailey and Joy Kloman

This exhibition brings together two Oregon painters who draw from personal and ancestral histories, using images of relatives and found photographs to reconstruct moments from the past. Don Bailey’s work emerges from his experience as a Native American (Hoopa, Northern California) artist, while Joy Kloman’s paintings depict subjects of European descent. Despite these differences, both artists share a sensitivity to memory, representation, and time.

The source materials they engage with carry weight: histories shaped by displacement, cultural loss, and the complexities of how people and communities have been seen, recorded, and remembered. These are not all neutral images, but fragments of lived experience, often filtered through distance and absence.

Seen together, the work moves beyond heaviness alone. Through vibrant color, layered pattern, and a careful attention to the figure, each artist reclaims and reanimates ancestral histories through visual storytelling. Their paintings balance the weight of the past with moments of joy, whimsy, and intimacy, transforming inherited images into works of care, connection, and continuity.