LPAPA Signature Artist Member Thomas Jefferson Kitts’ painting “Sacred Rights” (16×20 oil) was awarded both First Place and a 2016 Museum Purchase Award on the opening gala of the 13th Annual Pacific Northwest Plein Air Exhibition, held at the Maryhill Museum. The painting will go on display in the Maryhill Museum Fall 2016.
This indigenous salmon fishing platform can be found on the Columbia River, downstream from the Dalles Dam, on the Oregon side. These precarious looking wooden structures are built by the Wasco – Wishram, two Native American tribes. Each fishing site is ancestral, and shared within its tribal family, and, as such, each platform remains communally tethered to a larger 15,000 year history of the Pacific Northwest peoples. In fact, the tribes who continue to fish from these structures still call themselves “The People of the River” or “The People of the Salmon.” The people still gather today along the Oregon shore to continue their traditions of the Potlach – a gift-giving ceremony.  ThomasKitts.com
