“The first mark you make on the canvas unsettles everything and the conversation with the artwork begins. When the magic is working and you are in the flow, then that work contains its own lifetime--a beginning, middle and end."
As an undergraduate, Kathan Zerzan was placed on an FBI watch list for her leadership in campus protests that rocked the University of Oregon in 1970. Her activism reverberated through her twenty year career as a registered nurse and as one of the first nurse practitioners in the country. Even at Pacific Northwest College of Art in the late 1990s, Kathan’s class project was covered by The Oregonian under the headline: Six naked, plastic-wrapped art students protest plight of homeless.
"I try to decipher my visual vocabulary as a response to the liminal aspects of the times we are living in. I think about cultural resistance and hope. I wonder what our art reveals about who we are. Who am I? I am the first woman with a solo show in this gallery. I am a lucky girl.”
