Ryan Pierce

Ryan Pierce (b. 1979, Fort Bragg, CA) is a Portland-based painter, printmaker, and artist book maker whose work envisions a world recovering from human industry amid the pressures of climate chaos. Drawing on ecological theory, literature, and folk art, his paintings and prints portray the resilience of natural systems, flora and fauna reclaiming wrecked structures, weeds pushing through asphalt, wild animals threading through the wreckage of the built world. Pierce approaches these subjects not with despair but with idiosyncratic humor and persistent hope, inviting viewers into dreamlike scenes proposing a collective reawakening, sharp societal critique and genuine wonderment held in the same frame.

Pierce co-founded Signal Fire with activist Amy Harwood in 2008, facilitating wilderness residencies and retreats for artists across disciplines on public lands in the American West until the organization concluded operations in 2024. He served as founding director of Wide Open Studios, an arts and ecology field program, and chairs the low-residency MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. He serves on the board of directors at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, where he completed a fellowship at the Jordan Schnitzer Printmaking Residency. He was recently selected alongside artist Charlene Liu to create large-scale public artworks for Portland International Airport, his contribution a panoramic kiln-formed glass landscape titled Liberated Luggage, produced in collaboration with Glasmalerei Peters Studios.

Pierce received his BFA from Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2003 and his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2007. His work earned grants from the Joan Mitchell and San Francisco Foundations and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, and has been reviewed in Art in America, Art Papers, and The Oregonian. In 2019, his work was included in the Portland Art Museum's inaugural regional triennial, the map is not the territory. Solo presentations include Elizabeth Leach Gallery and Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder in Trondheim, Norway, and group exhibitions at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, and Irvine Contemporary in Washington, DC.