Morgan Ritter

USA, b. 1989, Thousand Oaks, California, lives and works in Portland, OR

Morgan Ritter: SPACE AVAILABLE

Aug 10 - Feb 2027

Portland International Airport

7000 NE Airport Way, Portland, OR 97218

About the Project

Morgan Ritter is a Portland-based artist whose intermedia practice spans sculpture, textiles, drawing, and poetic text. Guided by a dream logic, she works across materials and forms to explore perception and the unstable boundary between interior experience and shared cultural space. For her installation in PDX’s Concourse E, Ritter presents SPACE AVAILABLE, a large-scale hand-sewn textile curtain with interspersed sculptural objects in a permanent display case. Borrowing the language of advertising, the work transforms the phrase “SPACE AVAILABLE / For pleasure and dreaming” into an invitation to pause, drift, and imagine other kinds of space within the airport’s commercial and architectural environment.

Artist Bio

An artist, poet, and mother, Ritter (affectionately known as Mo) playfully generates her work from hypnagogic states where object, action, sensation, and language move freely. In her practice, small or intimate gestures accumulate into large, conceptually dense projects spanning drawing, sculpture, text, HTML web pages, and textiles. Researcher Meredith Whittaker notes that Ritter's voice and body reject a "bloodless vision of the world... by observing the constitutive intersubjectivity that animates life and confounds categorical systems.”

Ritter's work has been exhibited at traditional institutions and unconventional sites alike, including the 2017 Whitney Biennial (NY), MoMA (NY), Artists Space (NY), Noon Projects (LA), Shanaynay (Paris), PICA, an orchard, and a lightbulb store. She is a Co-Director at House of Art and Craft and serves on the Art Collection Committee at the Oregon Jewish Museum. A longtime "WAGENT" with Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), her work has been featured in Artforum, Art Practical, Art Viewer, e-flux, W Magazine, and Vice.

Her practice has been supported by grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), and The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. She has attended residencies at Anderson Ranch and Ken Kesey’s Farm.