Mel Katz

Mel Katz trained at Cooper Union, New York and the Brooklyn Museum Art School in the mid 1950s before moving to Portland in 1964 to each at the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art). A year later he transferred to Portland State University where he taught for over 30 years. In addition to participating in numerous group exhibitions, Katz also has had solo exhibitions in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco including a retrospective at the Portland Art Museum in 1988. He won the Oregon Governor’s Award for the Arts in 1999. His work can be found in public and private collections throughout the Northwest region and he has executed commissions for a number of public buildings.Over the course of his career, Katz’s work evolved from abstract painting to working with shaped canvases before moving off the wall to create three-dimensional works. Because his works move fluidly between drawing, painting, and sculpture, often incorporating elements of all three, Katz prefers to call them “shape paintings”.