Lillian Pitt making Raku fired clay mask, circa 1980s. Courtesy of the artist. / Lillian Pitt, Little Opossum Girl, 1990, clay and glass beads, Collection of the Portland Art Museum, Gift of Phyllis Koven
Born on the Warm Springs Reservation and tribally affiliated with Warm Springs, Wasco and Yakama peoples, Lillian Pitt found art at community college after years as a hairdresser in Portland.
Central to Pitt’s iconography is Tsagaglalal, “She Who Watches,” a petroglyph figure located near the once-thundering Celilo Falls, a site of trade, ceremony and intertribal gathering until damming flooded the area and reshaped both river and life. Pitt has moved across media — shaping clay masks, cast glass figures, bronzes, jewelry and prints. Her public commissions show her collaborative way of making room.
Her work now adorns important civic spaces from the Oregon Convention Center to Portland State University, stretching out along the Interstate MAX line, and soon to appear at the Portland International Airport. Pitt’s artwork has been exhibited globally, including at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington; CM Gorman Museum, UC Davis, California; and The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington. Institutional attention has continued to gather around Pitt’s work as acknowledgment of an artist who has long been central to the Northwest’s cultural life.
She received a 1990 Oregon Governor’s Award for the Arts; an Oregon Chiles Foundation Award from the High Desert Museum, Bend, Oregon; a Leadership Award from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Portland, Oregon; was named Honored Citizen by the Architecture Foundation of Oregon; and a History Maker by the Oregon Historical Society. Pitt received an honorary doctorate from the University of Portland in 2022.
As Museum at Warm Springs Director and Pitt’s niece Elizabeth Woody describes, “She held ground and broke ground in major art institutions and academic venues that had not previously shown contemporary works from thriving Indigenous artists of her generation.”
The Story of Lillian Pitt
Insights into the life and craft of the inaugural recipient of the 1905 Legacy Award in the Visual Arts.