2025 Hallie Ford Fellows Awarded to Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), Derek Franklin, and Vo Vo
Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to announce that three of our represented artists—Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), Derek Franklin, and Vo Vo—have been selected as the 2025 Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts.
Hallie Ford Fellowships in the Visual Arts honor the legacy of the late Hallie E. Ford, co-founder of The Ford Family Foundation. The artists were chosen from a competitive pool of 160 applicants and join the ranks of 55 peers selected over the 15 years of the program as Oregon visual artists who have demonstrated a depth of sophisticated practice and potential for significant future accomplishment.
We are honored to represent Siestreem, Franklin, and Vo and thrilled to see their work and visions recognized. We extend our heartfelt congratulations to the artists on this achievement and look forward to continued collaboration and supporting their creative journeys ahead.
SARA SIESTREEM (HANIS COOS)
Photo by Sam Gehrke
Sara Siestreem (b. 1976. Lives and works in Portland, Oregon) is a multidisciplinary artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon, working in painting, photography, printmaking, weaving, and large-scale installation. She combines the ceremonial traditions of her ancestors with contemporary modes and materials at the intersection of social and ecological justice, education, and Indigenous feminism. Siestreem was recently awarded the University of Oregon’s CFAR Fellowship, and a Forge Project Fellowship.
Her work is in collections including the Forge Project, Mahicannituck (Hudson River) Valley, NY; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Missoula Art Museum, Missoula MT; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA, and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. Her artwork was recently included in the landmark 2023 book An Indigenous Present, conceived and edited by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee). She has an upcoming exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in September 2025.
Siestreem comes from a family of professional artists and educators; her training began in the home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakama) and her weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation).
Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from Portland State University. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute. She created a self-sustaining weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians.
“She is exceptionally professional, and has successfully navigated the complex gallery and museum landscape for twenty years,” said Reuben Roqueñi, Executive Director of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), “In her own right, she is an activist, carving out space for Native artists in a field that has historically not offered proper recognition.”
DEREK FRANKLIN
Photo by Sam Gehrke
Derek Franklin (b. 1981. Lives and works in Portland, Oregon) grew up in rural Scappoose, Oregon. While his early work as an industrial fabricator is appreciable in a sculpture practice that today includes sometimes large, welded, arcane ideation, the upbringing also made for what he describes an unlikely path to becoming an artist, and one that was hard-forged. His work today is multifaceted: a skilled painter and sculptor, his practice engages both, as it does art historical and domestic subjects.
After receiving his Master of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, Franklin became a Director of the esteemed Brooklyn artist-run space Soloway, before returning to the Pacific Northwest to found SE Cooper Contemporary, a gallery and residency space that, as Franklin describes, “capitalizes on the region’s relative isolation from other urban centers.” As well as running this endeavor and maintaining a serious studio presence, Franklin is the Artistic Director of Converge 45. Explains Marc Handleman, Associate Professor of Visual Art at Rutgers University, “Derek always wants to ‘open the door’ for others, to build and sustain dialogues, and to empower other artists. In this way, the forms of recognition or support that he’s received over the years, have always extended beyond him, multiplying their effects outward.”
“As a parent of 6 children in an interracial family, and growing up in generational poverty,” says Franklin, “I think about what we need to survive and the contradictions we must endure to do so in the contemporary landscape.”
Selected solo presentations of Franklin’s work include Document, Chicago; Thierry Goldberg, New York; and Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland; as well as group exhibitions at Simone Subal and Performa Biennial in New York; Melanie Flood Projects, Portland; and The Center for Art Research, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR. He is currently developing ongoing projects with Elizabeth Leach Gallery.
VO VO
Photo by Sam Gehrke
Vo Vo (b. 1981. Lives and works in Portland, Oregon), an immigrant from a (Vietnamese) refugee family, names and diagrams dynamics around imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and oppression. “I work from an international, populist perspective,” describes the artist, “with an intention to make these concepts approachable, accessible and dialectical.” Vo’s work spans textiles, installation and social practice that recognizes and provides direct care to contemporary traumas of a “third culture,” and other disenfranchised, displaced and threatened communities.
“By operating simultaneously on multiple dimensions – as highly advanced conceptual devices, as low-brow cultural ephemera, and as literal rugs and textile blankets,” says artist and 2024 Hallie Ford Fellow Sam Hamilton, “Vo’s work teases and (gently and lovingly) challenges us to dismantle and analyze our inherited assumptions and value metrics about art, culture, labor, and materiality.”
Vo’s work has recently been included in the 2024 Oregon Artists’ Biennial, Oregon Contemporary, Portland, Oregon; Converge 45, “Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship”; “Weaving Data,” Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, and, through May 31, 2025, at their solo exhibition with Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Of ev rywh re and n wh re.
They are also an editor, speaker, educator, curator, and musician who has exhibited and toured internationally. They received a Bachelor of Design in Architecture and a Graduate Certification in Design Science (Acoustics and Audio) from the University of Technology, Sydney; and a Master of Fine Arts (Visual Studies) from Pacific Northwest College of Art, Willamette University.