b'meetings in Portland where over time we envisioned a grant program that would offer a range of resources to assist Oregons most promising visual artists and visual arts institutions. One of the cornerstones of the grant program was the Hallie Ford Fellowships in the Visual Arts, which offers up to five unrestricted annual fellowships, each in the amount of $25,000, to Oregon visual artists who have demonstrated a sophisticated studio practice and displayed significant potential.The current exhibition, What Needs to Be Said: Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts, features the work of Hallie Ford Fellowships in the Visual Arts recipients from 2014, 2015, and 2016: Karl Burkheimer, Ben Buswell, Tannaz Farsi, MK Guth, Anya Kivarkis, Geraldine Ondrizek, Tom Prochaska, Wendy Red Star, Jack Ryan, Blair Saxon-Hill, Storm Tharp, Samantha Wall, and Lynn Woods Turner. I would like to congratulate these artists for being selected as Hallie Ford Visual Arts Fellows, for participating in the current exhibition, and for enhancing the visual arts ecology of Oregon.I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to independent curator Diana Nawi for selecting a superb exhibition and for coordinating and contributing to the accompanying full-color book. In addition, I would like to thank senior advisor for the visual arts Kandis Brewer Nunn from The Ford Family Foundation for her help in coordinating every aspect of the project, from tracking down artist addresses to suggesting potential venues for the regional tour. I have known and admired Kandis for twenty years and I cant think of anyone else I would rather work with on this project. I am further indebted to the other contributors and essayists to the book: Amy Bernstein, Essence Harden, Sam Hopple, Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, Nicole Smythe-Johnson, and Charlie Tatum.As always, I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to Phil Kovacevich for yet another beautifully designed book, and to Sigrid Asmus for her careful and thoughtful proof editing of the text. At the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, I would like to thank my dedicated, talented, and hard-working staff for their help with various aspects of the project: collections 12'