Stephen Hayes

Throughout his career, Stephen Hayes has explored themes of the land, loss, sexuality, identity, beauty and violence. No matter the subject, his works exude an authenticity and depth of understanding that belie their seeming nonchalance of execution or familiarity of imagery.

“In our society we distrust aesthetic experience—in particular the experience of beauty—and have come to associate it with the superficial and the vacuous. The paintings of Stephen Hayes remind us that in spite of contemporary skepticism, it is still possible to find beauty wedded to meaning.” – Terri Hopkins, Emerita Curator, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (catalog excerpt)

In a career now in its fourth decade, Hayes has held over thirty-five solo exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad, and his works have been curated into nearly seventy group shows by a broad diversity of curatorial voices, among whom are: Kristy Edmunds, Cassandra Coblentz, Stuart Horodner, Linda Tesner, Bruce Guenther, Terri Hopkins, John Weber, Peter Frank, Willem de Looper and Mary Jane Jacob. Exhibitions of his paintings, prints and drawings have been reviewed in Art Forum by Stephanie Snyder, in Art in America by Sue Taylor, in Artweek by Lois Allan and by Paul Sutinen for Oregon Arts Watch. He is a featured artist in Lois Allan’s comprehensive Contemporary Printmaking in the Northwest as well as Lauren P. Della Monica’s Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views and New American Paintings Number 121, curated by Nina Bozicnik.

Works by Stephen Hayes are housed in the collections of the New York Public Library, the Frans Masereel Centrum voor Grafiek in Kasterlee, Belgium, The Portland Art Museum, The Hallie Ford Museum, The Gates Foundation, Lewis and Clark College and more than one hundred private and public collections in the United States, Europe and Japan. Support for his work has come in the form of fellowships, grants and residencies from The Ford Family Foundation, The Ucross Foundation, WESTAF and the NEA, The Oregon Arts Commission, Caldera, the Frans Masereel Center, The Vermont Studio Center, Clark College and Oregon State University.

Stephen Hayes is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon, and by the David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe, NM and New York, NY. More information is available at his website.

Profile photograph by Kenneth Dixon