Poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place.
Interdisciplinary visual art, pigment practice, painting, and poetry, 2013–ongoing
Practice timeline — click any row to expand
Primary Project
2019 — ongoing
A decade-long interdisciplinary project transforming memories at sites of genocide and ecocide through pigments, poetry, installations, and community events.
Companion Project
2017 — ongoing
Pigments foraged from specific sites — concentrating and preserving place-based memory as color.
Part of Memory of a Larger Mind
2024 — 2025
A site-specific installation refilling a disappeared Portland wetland, drop by drop.
Part of Memory of a Larger Mind
2020 — 2022
Cyanotypes made with sunlight, found objects, and inherited memory. A selection forthcoming 2027.
Completed 2025
2017 — 2025
Abstract paintings traced from NASA satellite images of glacier retreat, made with pigments foraged from those same glaciers.
Part of Memory of a Larger Mind
2022 — 2024
Circular forms made of stones, flowers, and wild waters — ecosystems linked, zeros opened, homeward gestures cast backward and forward in time.
Completed 2022
2019 — 2022
Paintings following the desire of materials — bone, egg, water, flower — to find each other, tracing the diasporic pull toward connection.
Completed 2020
2013 — 2020
Paintings exploring pigment, color, and flowers as actants — forces that act upon and reshape the world, just as a mineral, a carrot, or a human body does.
Completed 2014
2013 — 2014
A collaborative project with poets putting poems into public space.
Books, poems, essays, and readings
Books
Finalist, National Jewish Book Awards
An erasure of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the world's most influential antisemitic text — transformed into a poem about power, inheritance, and renewal. Part of Memory of a Larger Mind.
More →Oregon Book Award for Poetry, 2024 · Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Kazim Ali
Debut collection. Poems that incorporate multiple voices to embrace fragmentation, discord, and plurality. At a time of simultaneous isolation and interconnection, this book is an inquiry into the edges of the self. Moving between a remote canyon in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, the virtual world, the past, and the unstable future, the poet asks, "Whose afterimage am I?" Sprawling, celebratory, and mourning, this chorus of voices encompasses violence, love, empathy, fear, a burning planet, a pandemic, heartbreak, desire, joy, and grief.
More →Written sitting on glaciers as they disappeared. Poems of movement: ice to water to light; grief to love to joy to grief. Part of Memory of a Larger Mind.
More →Cyanotypes, poems, and essays exploring geologic and intergenerational time. Featuring images from the Light / Remains visual series (2020–2022). Part of Memory of a Larger Mind.
Essays & Prose
Readings
Holocaust Museum LA
5-3-5 Poetry Salon
Chatter PDX
New Jewish Culture Foundation
Taylor & Co Books
Jewish Community Library / Lehrhaus
Yetzirah Reading Series
Rose City Book Pub
Chamber Music Northwest — Featured Poet, Season Finale
Bishop and Wilde
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment
Chorus — California Launch
Chorus — Northwest Launch
Oregon Humanities Live
Wrangell Mountains Center
Omnidawn · forthcoming October 2026
Poetry
Poems written with glaciers, an elegy and a love song for a world moving from ice to water to light.
These luminous poems were written outdoors, in the presence of glaciers, composed with shifting light, wind, sound, and scent, alive to our current moment while keeping one foot in geologic time. They're elegies and love songs, celebrations and laments. As the world moves from ice to water, the poems move too: cycling through grief, love, and joy, asking how to withstand and how to transform.
At the heart of this work is memory — planetary, cultural, familial, and personal. It's part of a larger project exploring sacrifice zones: clear-cuts, concentration camps, dying glaciers. In these places of layered loss, the poet gathers flowers, rocks, waters, and bones, then transmutes them into pigments for her visual art, and into language for her writing. The result is work in which all bodies are understood as dynamic, always becoming; in which difficult pasts may open toward more peaceful futures; and in which grief, handled with care, might shift into love.
Advance Praise
Is a glacier a memory? Is it time? An echo of the past? In Daniela Naomi Molnar's Memory of a Larger Mind, the glacier is an incantation, a kaddish, something both primordial and fixed, a thing so sentient it is at our mercy. Molnar brings us to the ice and embodies the lyric with a vision and clarity that comes only from grief. She asks us, "When a memory goes / what flows into its gap?" Here, Molnar is thinking as much about inheritance as the nature left behind, the ways that time and its bodies are at once an "insouciant menace" and a shared gossamer thing. There is a feeling in Molnar's poetry of a ruptured deity captured in the calving of ice, hope transmitted through witness, and a millennia-deep ache for that which has always already moved through ice and stone. Memory of a Larger Mind is an astonishing collection of poems, one of the best books I've read in years. It will take your breath away in its insistences and urgencies.
Natalie Eilbert
Author of Overland
In these keening poems, Daniela Naomi Molnar seeks solace in glaciers, and the ice responds. A stern but patient tutor, ice illuminates a cerulean path through grief. It is a lens for seeing ourselves in proper perspective, a prism that reveals the full spectrum of human experience. Glaciers remind us that "the only promise... time makes is to be ongoing."
Marcia Bjornerud
Professor of Geosciences, Lawrence University · author of Turning to Stone
In the Jewish tradition, the kaddish, the mourning prayer, is simultaneously a song of praise for the unutterable, for that which is beyond all language, all praise. Here too Daniela Naomi Molnar has written a kaddish for our moment, for a glacier lost to melting, for ancestors known and unknown, that is simultaneously an exaltation for all that changes and in changing lives on: "let the pre-name turn to name / then let the name turn nameless." With incredible precision of syllable and sound, of rhythm and movement, these poems of astounding beauty beseech us to attend to the earth's own memory, which is our own memory, for as these poems know, we are not other than the earth with which we live. "Become an apprentice to the immaterial." Amen.
Julie Carr
Author of The Garden
Like a glacier, Daniela Naomi Molnar's poems carve and clarify their readers. This book of poems asks us to slow with its hefty task — to untame the distance between remembering and forgetting, to feral our future ghosts. Daniela excavates indifference with muscular language, investigative silence, and undiluted sentience, offering us opportunities to remember the global body with our own. Unshrinking from the onslaught of erosion, erasure, and amnesia, each poem annunciates what endures after we, and the world, are broken. Daniela shows us that all grief cuts towards a bedrock of love.
Nina Elder
Artist
Ayin Press · 2025 · Finalist, National Jewish Book Awards
Poetry · Erasure · Essay
An exploration of power, memory, belief, and the dangers and possibilities of language.
PROTOCOLS: An Erasure transforms the world's most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring questions of power, history, and language. By redacting words from the original document, the book-length poem breathes space into a text dense with hatred, excavating new meanings and questions. It asks what forms power can take other than oppression and control, and how language — weaponized and eroded — can be a tool for healing. And it calls for unity and human connection at a time of polarization and fear.
Accompanying the poem, a lyric essay excavates the poet's deep personal connection to the source text, weaving personal and collective history by traversing former concentration camps, immigrant communities in New York City, and remote desert wildernesses.
Publisher
Publication Date
2025
Press
LA Review of Books
Harvard Review
The Creative Independent
Praise
"'We are repeat children,' poet Daniela Naomi Molnar writes in this searing, necessary meditation on inherited trauma, cycles of violence, and the possibility of healing. PROTOCOLS: An Erasure is a fragmented psalm, an outcry, a fractured cultural memoir, and a gripping and timely reflection on how human beings can choose to use language to destroy — or to rebuild."
Alicia Jo Rabins
Author of Fruit Geode and Divinity School
"This book is oracular, tender, and absolutely brilliant. Daniela Naomi Molnar looked into a foundational antisemitic text and traced a radiant meditation on power and being. Her essay about her grandmother Rosalie contains some of the best writing I have read about ancestry, inheritance, and survival. This book is a blessing, a transmutation of suffering into a spacious body of language and light."
Rachel Jamison Webster
Author of Benjamin Banneker and Us
PROTOCOLS: An Erasure is a text that holds within it the complexity of inherited Jewish trauma, the courage to reject exceptionalism and its supremacist logics, and the tenderness to honor loss and cradle the grieving body across generations. Daniela Naomi Molnar asks: "How to not be history's accomplice?" This book is a master class on grief and the creative, regenerative impulse, metabolizing trauma and loss into a form that both mourns and resists. Brave, meticulous, haunting, and brilliant, this book is a journey of transfiguration, a widening of my mind."
Mónica Gomery
Author of Might Kindred
"Daniela Naomi Molnar's ingestion of The Protocols' verbal poison confronts the monstrousness of a 'zombie text refusing to die' and brings about a momentary reversal of trigger and trauma, valence and polarity. The heart of this audacious erasure glows in a darkness that's ancient and very much of our moment. Disturbing and generative."
Peter Cole
Author of Draw Me After: Poems
"At once a reckoning and a declaration, Daniela Naomi Molnar demands of the past a yielding to something new. Leaving traces of historical violence visible while aspiring to 'that / which cannot be / individual,' Molnar carves through the pages of histories' hauntings to sculpt a new surface, textured with liberatory possibilities, laced with the temptations and catastrophes of belonging, and reaching towards care — towards 'a new, spacious body through which to speak.'"
Rachel Kaufman
Author of Many to Remember
"Erasing the world's most influential antisemitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Daniela Naomi Molnar's PROTOCOLS: An Erasure repurposes the violence, theft, and mutilation of its source text, reducing The Protocols to only what is needed to express the effects and affects of living in antisemitism's snare — to only what is needed to show what it means to be bound by history to language that seeks to erase your being — to only what is needed to untie the constraints of that language."
Adie Steckel
Writer and editor, Fonograf Editions
"In her unflinching work PROTOCOLS: An Erasure, Daniela Naomi Molnar reexamines one of the most antisemitic documents in world history, asking us 'to return to the / center / to be / nothing / honestly.' Molnar's brilliant erasure reveals her generous, undaunted craft, inventing new sites of possibility that emerge — even from the abhorrent ruins of the source text. Molnar lyrically asserts that, even amid despair and cynicism, 'our hands exist / as love, a boundless / agriculture / of intelligence.'"
Rosebud Ben-Oni
Author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery
Omnidawn · 2023 · Oregon Book Award for Poetry, 2024 · Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Kazim Ali
Poetry · Debut collection
Debut collection. Poems that incorporate multiple voices to embrace fragmentation, discord, and plurality. At a time of simultaneous isolation and interconnection, this book is an inquiry into the edges of the self. Moving between a remote canyon in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, New York City, the virtual world, the past, and the unstable future, the poet asks, "Whose afterimage am I?" Sprawling, celebratory, and mourning, this chorus of voices encompasses violence, love, empathy, fear, a burning planet, a pandemic, heartbreak, desire, joy, and grief.
Publisher
Publication Date
January 2023
Awards
Oregon Book Award for Poetry, 2024 · Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Kazim Ali
Praise
"CHORUS is a lyric wail stunned into awakening by crises both planetary and personal — though here, as in the physical universe, the two are not oppositional phenomena. Pieces made of fragmented verse, sinuous prose, and desperate frenzied plea make a rhetoric of salve, or salvation. As the poet writes, 'The songbird is and is not a metaphor. / The songbird is and is not gone.' What I mean to say to you (I meaning me, you meaning absolutely you, the one reading this) is that this is a book that speaks from a body and to a body. I felt spoken to. Known. 'Are you there. Is anyone there.'"
Kazim Ali
Judge, Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Contest
"Tendrilic, electric, Daniela Naomi Molnar's CHORUS traces a mind in swift action. A near daybook, this collection is intimate and expansive, born of the solitudes highlighted in the pandemic, while resistant to the individualisms thrust upon us. It is a choral undertaking that points to the ecosystems of our languages, the subterranean connections between our lives and the world, and the 'open portals' of books in our current fires. A stunning book by a poet I am excited to follow."
Solmaz Sharif
Author of Customs
"CHORUS beautifully embodies the ancient function of its title: an 'I' gathers to speak communally, to and of the crux in which we find ourselves. Locating luminous detail amidst the disaster, these poems are portals open to the personal, the collective, the playful, and the innovative, offering us language's capacity to bring us to our senses."
Eleni Sikelianos
Oregon Book Award judge · Author of Make Yourself Happy
Reviews
Tinderbox Poetry Journal
Publisher's Weekly
The Kalliope
Forthcoming 2027
Forthcoming 2027
Poetry · Artist's book · Forthcoming
Cyanotypes, poems, and essays exploring how language and image can transform grief into new imaginative possibilities. The third book in a trilogy that began with PROTOCOLS: An Erasure and continued with Memory of a Larger Mind, Light / Remains returns to the themes of those books with new eyes. Some stories and questions find resolution; others open anew.
The poems are in conversation with cyanotypes from the Light / Remains visual series (2020–2022), images made across sites including KL Płaszów, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Svalbard, Kennicott, Cluj, Ana Springs, and Prairie Hill.
Cyanotype's primary pigment, Prussian Blue, shares its chemistry with prussic acid — a key component of Zyklon B, the lethal gas used in Nazi death camps. This chemical fact, and the color's sustained traces in the sites where the gas was used, inform the work. But Light / Remains holds this color's violence in balance with its vivid beauty. Both forces live here, side by side.
Forthcoming
2027
Online poems, telepoems, visual/verbal works, and publications
Online Poems & Telepoems
Visual / Verbal Poems
Poems in Books & Journals
Essays, art writing, book reviews, and literary criticism
Essays
Art Writing & Book Reviews
Poetry, pigment-making, and ecological grief — colleges, museums, residencies, and community since 2006
I've been teaching adults and young adults in academic, community, and alternative spaces since 2006. I approach teaching as a world-making practice and a creative collaboration — always from an interdisciplinary perspective that draws on science, philosophy, and ecology alongside poetics and visual art.
I teach as a visiting poet and artist at colleges and universities, arts organizations, museums, and community centers. I founded and directed the Art + Ecology undergraduate concentration at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and was a founding member of Signal Fire's board of directors, an artist residency serving artists working at the intersection of art and ecology (2008–2023).
I'm available to teach workshops, give readings and talks, and offer extended residencies at institutional venues. Get in touch →
Workshop Offerings
Natural pigment-making workshops grounded in place-based inquiry and artistic research. Participants forage materials from local ecologies, make pigments together, and explore the environmental and social histories embedded in color. Available in half-day, full-day, weekend, and week-long formats.
Residencies · Universities · Museums · Community
Writing workshops that use place-based attention, close observation, and lyric inquiry to acknowledge and transform ecological grief. Drawing on ecopoetics and incorporating a range of diverse poets and interdisciplinary thinkers. Suitable for writers at all levels.
Universities · Museums · Environmental Organizations
Courses and workshops exploring the intersection of poetry, visual art, and ecology. Topics include: interdisciplinary art as ecological witness, postmemory and poetics, the lyric essay, and docupoetics. Adaptable for MFA, undergraduate, and community contexts.
MFA Programs · Colleges & Universities · Residencies
Upcoming Workshops
Pigment + Place with Heidi Gustafson
Subscribe to the newsletter for new workshop announcements
Selected Past Workshops
Every Force Evolves a Form: A Class on Poetic Form
Poetry Workshop: Climate Grief
Pigment + Place
Pigment + Place
Pigment + Place
Poetry Workshop: Climate Grief
Pigment + Place
Poetry of Place / Pigment + Place
Pigment + Place
Art + Ecology — Undergraduate Concentration
Selected Institutional Teaching
Colleges & Universities
Pacific Northwest College of Art (Associate Professor, 2007–2020)
Portland Community College (adjunct, 2007–2009)
Cornell University
Reed College
Willamette University
Wells College
Museums & Cultural Institutions
Oregon Jewish Museum
Anchorage Museum
516 Arts, Albuquerque
Kittredge Gallery, Tacoma
Kolva-Sullivan Gallery, Spokane
Residencies & Organizations
Signal Fire (Founding Member, Board of Directors, 2008–2023)
Wide Open Studios (faculty, 2008–2021)
PLAYA, Summer Lake
Oregon Wild
Ucross Foundation
Art/Lab, Portland
Camp Colton
The Arctic Circle
Caldera Arts Center
FestivALT, Kraków
Selected Talks & Readings
Talks & Lectures
Keynote, Tulsa Literary Festival
Holocaust Museum Los Angeles
Guest Artist and Poet, Reed College
Guest Artist and Poet, Emory University
Bay Area Book Festival
Oregon Wild
AMP Conference, Western States Center
Keystone Speaker, Visiting Writers Series, Northwest Academy
Guest Artist/Poet, Eastern Washington University
Guest Poet, Clackamas Community College
University of San Francisco
Guest Artist, Oregon Humanities — "The Circle is Expanding, Still: The Gift of Climate Grief"
Guest Artist/Poet, Oregon Jewish Museum
Guest Artist/Poet, PRAX, Oregon State University
Guest Artist/Poet, Clemson University
Guest Artist/Poet, University of Puget Sound — Flow: Art & Ecology in a Changing Climate
Guest Presenter, ASLE — with Allison Cobb
Guest Artist, Willamette University
Guest Presenter, Oregon Humanities — "The Circle is Expanding: The Gift of Climate Grief"
Guest Artist, Whitworth University
Guest Artist, Gonzaga University
Guest Artist, Ayatana Biophilium Residency: Science School for Artists
Guest Artist, Yale University MFA Program
Guest Presenter, College Art Association — "New Earth: Affective Ecology, Climate Grief + Cultural Change"
Visiting Artist, Eastern Oregon University
Guest Artist, University of Oregon
Guest Artist, Oregon State University
Selected Poetry Readings
5-3-5 Poetry Salon
Eliot Bay Book Company
PEN World Voices Festival
Protocols: An Erasure — San Francisco Launch
New Jewish Culture Foundation
Jewish Community Library / Lehrhaus
Powell's Books
Taylor & Co Books
Chamber Music Northwest — Featured Poet, Season Finale
Chorus — California Launch
Oregon Humanities Live
Wrangell Mountains Center
For a full list of readings, see Writing →
Focused, individualized support for poets, writers, visual artists, and pigment-makers. I offer a limited number of sliding-scale individual mentorships — some students work with me for years, others for just a few sessions. I bring an interdisciplinary lens and a commitment to each person's particular practice and voice.
Focused, constructive support for poetry or prose manuscripts at any stage of development. Includes an initial conversation about the project, extensive written observations and editorial suggestions, and a follow-up session. Available for full collections, essay collections, or hybrid work.
Awards
Oregon Book Award for Poetry (2024) · Miller SPARK Award (2025) · Finalist, National Jewish Book Award (2026) · Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Kazim Ali (2021)
Residencies & Fellowships
The Arctic Circle (2023) · FestivALT, Kraków (2023) · Ucross (2022) · PLAYA, Summer Lake (2022, 2025) · Wrangell Mountains Center (2022) · Ford Family Foundation Golden Spot Artist (2017) · Caldera Arts (2015)
Collections
Oregon Jewish Museum · City of Portland · Whitworth University · Round Weather Gallery
Upcoming
Solo exhibition: Oregon Jewish Museum, Portland (2027) · Jerusalem Bienniale (2026) · Between the Covers podcast with David Naimon (2027, forthcoming)
Talks & Readings
PEN World Voices · Bay Area Book Fest · Tulsa LitFest (keynote, 2026) · Holocaust Museum Los Angeles · Yale · Cornell · Emory · OSU and many others
Selected press, reviews & interviews
Harvard Review
LA Review of Books
Jewish Book Council
James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation
Haaretz · Andrew Esensten
Literary Arts Oregon
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Los Angeles Times (front page) · Julia Rosen
Daniela Naomi Molnar is a poet and artist who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her art centers on place-based memory — planetary, cultural, familial, and personal. She works with pigments she makes from plants, bones, stones, and specific waters: rainwater, glacial melt, river water. Poems and essays are created alongside the visual art; the practices overlap and influence each other.
Her current work explores the histories and futures of sacrifice zones — clear cuts, concentration camps, dying glaciers. In these places, she gathers flowers, rocks, waters, and bones, and she writes. In her studio, she transmutes these materials into pigments for her art and memories for her writing. The work transforms grief into attention, color, and possible futures.
Her training in both science and art informs her practice. A degree in Scientific Illustration led to work as an Art Director at Scientific American. She later founded and directed the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and helped start and run the artist residency Signal Fire from 2008 to 2023. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Chorus (Omnidawn, 2023) — Oregon Book Award for Poetry; Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize, selected by Kazim Ali
Protocols: An Erasure (Ayin Press, 2025) — Finalist, National Jewish Book Award
Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, forthcoming October 2026)
Light / Remains (forthcoming 2027)
Miller SPARK Award (2025) · National Jewish Book Award Finalist (2026) · Oregon Book Award for Poetry (2024) · The Arctic Circle Residency (2023) · LABA Fellowship, San Francisco (2023) · FestivALT Residency and Grant, Kraków (2023) · Ucross Foundation (2022) · Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant (2021) · Ford Family Foundation Golden Spot Artist (2017)
PEN World Voices · Bay Area Book Festival · Tulsa LitFest (keynote, 2026) · Holocaust Museum Los Angeles · Yale University · Cornell University · Emory University · University of Oregon · and many others
Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2025)
Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology (Laurel Review, 2024)
The Glacier is a Being, with photographs by Julian Stettler (Sturm & Drang, 2023)
MFA in Poetry, Warren Wilson College (2021)
Graduate Certificate in Scientific Illustration, UC Santa Cruz (2006)
BA in Environmental Studies and Art, The Evergreen State College (2000)
Site-specific installation · 2024–2025 · Building 5, NW Marine Artworks, Portland, Oregon
Materials
Cast glass · Balch Creek water · Willamette River water · Columbia River water · Rainwater · Serviceberry · Wild rose · White yarrow · Goldenrod · Tansy · Coreopsis · Dogbane · Cedar · Ponderosa pine · Douglas Fir · Horse chestnut · Oak gall · Walnut · Alder · Elk bone · Oregon grape · Lupine · Shale · Tin can · Handmade cotton paper · Glass vials
Exhibition
"Terrain: A Land Art Residency and Site-Specific Installation"
Building 5, NW Marine Artworks · Portland, OR · 2024–2025
Building 5 is now in an industrial area, but it was once Guild's Lake — a 250-acre riparian marsh fed by seasonal rainwater and the Willamette River. The lake had a pulse, growing larger in winter rains, smaller in summer's heat. During dry spells it was marshy, offering critical habitat for birds and other wildlife. During winter, it dilated to a deeper lake.
In 1905, to prepare for the Lewis and Clark Exposition, the lake was dammed and excavated so it would look less marshy, more like a "proper" lake. After the Exposition ended, the lake returned to its original marshy state and fell out of favor with those in power. Later that year, Guild's Lake was acquired by a developer and filled in for industrial use, using giant mining hoses to sluice dirt from nearby hillsides. By 1913, a fifty-acre industrial center existed where the lake had been. The first factory built in what is now Building 5 was a tin can factory.
In Memory Lake, pigments and waters foraged from the former lake's watershed drip from above like rain, making their way drop by drop through a series of glass forms that resemble cells, clouds, or constellations. The glass forms are modeled after lace that my grandmothers and her sisters made by hand — lace made around the same time the lake was disappearing. The pigment and water drip through these layers of memory and land on a map of the former lake, refilling it drop by drop.
The tin can from which the water drips is a gesture towards closing the circle — that which removed the lake now helps it return.
In addition to the sculpture and the painting, the installation included a spectrum of glass vials. Each vial contains a pigment made from a plant or animal that would have grown or wandered along the banks of the lake that once lived here.
While working on this piece, I dreamt often and vividly of daylighting the creek that fed Guild's Lake, Balch Creek. I saw the creek touched by sunlight and rain, galloping through fern-lined banks to reach the floodplain. I saw the lake pulse like a slow heart. Each time I dreamt this dream, I felt an asphalt-heavy weight lifted from my chest. Relief. I tried to create that feeling here.
Documentation · click any image to view
Images to be added — source files at current Wix page →
Ongoing companion project · 2017–present
What memories do places hold? How do we access them? In places where violence has occurred, how do we transmute difficult memories toward more peaceful futures?
This work involves collaborating with places vibrantly alive — wildernesses, urban parks, alpine meadows — as well as places on the edges of life: clear cuts, concentration camps, and dying glaciers. In these places, I listen and forage flowers, rocks, bones, and wild waters to create pigments, and I write. The result is palettes of place assembled from poetry, prose, and color.
The pigments and waters of a place offer a direct line to a place's memory. My work explores how those memories might be transformed, and how that transformation might offer insight or healing to viewers and to the human and other-than-human inhabitants of a place.
In my studio, one wall is lined with shelves holding glass vials of pigments made from materials foraged from all over the world: an archive of memories and potentials. The vivid gold of my mother's marigolds in Vermont sits next to the pale green of ground elder from Płaszów, a concentration camp in Poland where my grandparents were imprisoned. I can hold these vials in my hand, write and think with them, paint with them, and create something new.
Traumas live on like stars — in people and in places. We feel their effects long after their ends. Making palettes of place has transformed my own memories. I hope it has also shifted those of my ancestors, viewers, and the inhabitants of the places themselves.
2025
Made of the northern Oregon Coast's flowers, berries, fungi, lichen, stones, cones, seeds, bones, fossilized spruce cones, and shells. Foraged from the Hoffman Center's Wonder Garden in Manzanita, Oregon, and from surrounding forests, shorelines, meadows, clearcuts, and roadsides. Pigments mixed with rainwater, creekwater, and ocean water.
As I was making this body of work, I had a suspicion that painting on silk would feel like painting on water — which made sense, to reflect this supremely watery place. I was right. Silk is smooth as an ebb tide and strong as a king tide. Its memory is infallible, like water's.
I allowed myself to lean into sensory immersion and beauty in this work, guided by the lush bioregion that inspired it.
Materials
Alder · Alectoria lichen · Basalts · Bitter Cherry · Blue glass · Cascara · Ceanothus · Copper · Coreopsis · Devil's Club · Elderberry · Elk Bone · Goldenrod · Horse Chestnut · Horsetail · Huckleberry · Iris (wild and domesticated) · Iron · Lupine · Madder · Marigold · Oceanspray · Ochres · Oregon Grape · Paint fungus (Echinodontium tinctorium) · Queen Anne's Lace · Rhododendron · Rust · Saskatoon · Scotch Broom · Shore Pine · Tansy · Vivianite (fossilized spruce cone) · Wallflower · Walnut · White Rockrose · White Yarrow · Wild mustard · Woad · Wolf lichen
Exhibition
"Palette of Place: Coastal Ecotone"
Hoffman Center for the Arts · Manzanita, OR · 2025 (solo)
2023
For years, I lived in a house in Southeast Portland built on top of the now-buried headwaters of Johnson Creek — one of the major watersheds of the Willamette Valley. I didn't know the creek was under my house. No visible traces of it remain above ground. But headwaters kept appearing in my dreams. Historical maps helped me understand why, and led to the creation of this palette.
All of these colors were foraged from urban alleyways, "vacant" lots (which are anything but vacant), and sidewalks of this region. The water used to turn the pigments to watercolor paints is rainwater collected in my backyard and creekwater from Johnson Creek.
This work offers a reminder that nature isn't just "out there" in pristine, wild places. You and I are nature, and our cities are nature too. Our self-interest is indistinguishable from the self-interest of all other forms of life.
Made in connection with CETI's Postcards from a Climate Resilient Future
Materials
Urban forageables from Southeast Portland alleyways, vacant lots, and sidewalks · Rainwater (backyard) · Johnson Creek water
Interdisciplinary project, 2019–ongoing
Memory of a Larger Mind is an interdisciplinary project that gives form to the grief held in specific places, allowing it to transform. The project takes the form of paintings, sculptures, installations, cyanotypes, films, community events, and three books: Protocols: An Erasure (Ayin Press, 2025), Memory of a Larger Mind (Omnidawn, 2026), and Light / Remains (forthcoming 2027). It began in 2019 and is ongoing.
To make this work, I travel to sacrifice zones: sites of layered historical and ecological violence — former concentration and internment camps, disappeared sacred sites, previously glaciated landscapes. I gather what I find there: stones, plants, bones, water.
These materials become natural pigments, made in community workshops open to everyone. The process is playful and exploratory — even workshops focused on emotionally complex processes (turning a plant that grew on a mass grave into paint, for example) are always full of camaraderie and laughter. Curiosity brings lightness, which brings new insights into violent pasts. New possibilities emerge.
The resulting pigments form palettes of place: collections of color that hold the changed memories of a site and its people. These pigments lead to art reflecting the history and future of these communities — used directly in paintings and installations, and also functioning as an archive, a reference library that informs the work.
The project understands genocide and ecocide as inextricably linked — both expressions of the same logic that reduces living things, human and other-than-human, to instruments or obstacles. My own family history primed my attention to this: I am descended from survivors of Nazi concentration camps, and I grew up inheriting memories I did not live through firsthand.
But the postmemories this project works with are not only mine, and the sites are not only Jewish. Violence and resilience are shared inheritances. This project helps catalyze the regeneration in these places that is already underway.
Making color from places of harm is one way to insist on the aliveness of matter, the memory embedded in the earth, and the possibility — never final, always ongoing — of transformation.
Work in this project
Project timeline, 2019–2029 — click any row to expand
Sites — click any card to view documentation
KL Płaszów
Poland
Former concentration and forced labor camp in which all four of my grandparents were imprisoned. Site of ongoing pigment-making workshops in collaboration with FestivALT.
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Poland
Former Nazi death camp and extermination center. Both grandmothers survived Auschwitz. Pigments gathered from the sites bear witness to what written records cannot fully hold.
Cluj
Romania
Small city in Transylvania where my matrilineal ancestors lived for generations. Site of research, photography, and pigment-gathering connected to my family history of forced displacement.
Svalbard / The Arctic Circle
Norway
High Arctic archipelago and surrounding ocean islands, visited as part of The Arctic Circle residency (2023). Rocks, bones, seaweed, and debris collected from places covered for eons by glaciers — now uncovered, like wounds with their scabs ripped off.
Kennicott Glacier & Mine
Alaska
A rapidly retreating glacier alongside a former copper mine — ecological loss and industrial extraction in direct proximity. Wrangell Mountains Center residency (2022).
Portland Assembly Center
Pacific International Livestock Exposition, Portland
The Pacific International Livestock Exposition grounds served as an Assembly Center during WWII, incarcerating over 3,600 Japanese Americans in livestock stalls before their forced transfer to inland camps. Foraging and research underway.
Nyssa Camp
Nyssa, Oregon
Site of a temporary labor camp for Japanese American incarcerees brought to work eastern Oregon's sugar beet fields — one of the least-documented aspects of Japanese American incarceration. Foraging and research underway.
Balch Creek Watershed
Water & disappeared landscape
Portland, Oregon
Once Guild's Lake — a 250-acre riparian marsh drained for industry in 1913. Memory Lake (2024–2025) refills it drop by drop with foraged pigments and watershed waters.
Willamette River Basin
Water & Indigenous dispossession
Portland, Oregon
The Willamette River is a federally designated Superfund site due to decades of industrial contamination. It flows through land historically belonging to the Kalapuya people, whose removal the Oregon Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 formalized. Foraging and research underway.
Clackamas River Basin
Fire & water
Oregon
In 2020, the Riverside Fire burned over 138,000 acres across the Clackamas watershed — one of the most destructive fires in Oregon's recent history — leaving altered hydrology and a dramatically changed plant community. Foraging and research underway.
Ana Springs
Water & ecological loss
Oregon
Source of the Ana River — the sole water source for Summer Lake, threatened by groundwater depletion. Site of feldmestn-inspired walks and ecological fieldwork.
Snake River / Hells Canyon
Massacre, Indigenous dispossession & ecological collapse
Oregon / Idaho
The deepest river gorge in North America. In 1877, the Nez Perce were forcibly removed; ten years later, 34 Chinese gold miners were massacred here — the worst such massacre in U.S. history. Three dams block salmon migration; Snake River salmon approach functional extinction. Pigments gathered through the Oregon Origins Project (2024–25). New work in progress.
Mount Hood
Glacial retreat & Indigenous dispossession
Oregon
Oregon's highest peak, where glaciers are disappearing rapidly. As a co-author of Disappearing Glaciers of the Oregon Cascades (Annals of Glaciology, 2025), I have spent years documenting this loss through field observation. The New Earth series began here — that work led directly to Memory of a Larger Mind. New work in progress.
Mount Adams
Glacial retreat & Indigenous sacred land
Washington
Washington's second-highest peak, sacred to the Yakama Nation, whose treaty rights to the mountain's huckleberry fields have been contested since 1855. Glaciers in rapid retreat. Pigment work in progress.
Prairie Hill
Castleton, Vermont
Forty acres of meadow and forest — a former apple orchard killed by invasive fungus. Pigments made from the meadow, which is critical bird habitat, and from the artist's mother's flower garden, a spectral place made in the company of her memories.
Work by medium
Installations created in direct response to specific sites, using materials gathered from those places.
Memory Lake
Cast glass forms modeled after lace made by the artist's grandmothers, suspended above a map of the disappeared Guild's Lake. Pigments and waters foraged from the former lake's watershed drip through the glass forms and fall onto the map, refilling the lake drop by drop. Tin can, handmade cotton paper, glass vials.
Ana Springs Installation
A site-specific installation at Ana Springs drawing on the Jewish folk practice of feldmestn (thread-measuring of graves during communal crisis) as a structural and ritual framework for making the scale of ecological loss bodily and measurable.
Three books form an ode — a poetic three-part structure. The ode begins with an address; voyages through inner and outer worlds; and concludes with a return reflecting what the journey has changed.
Protocols: An Erasure
An erasure of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion transformed into a poem contemplating power and finding its source not in political leaders but in each of us and in the earth. Finalist, National Jewish Book Award. Reviewed in Harvard Review, LA Review of Books, Haaretz.
Memory of a Larger Mind
Poems written sitting on glaciers as they disappeared. Poems made of movement: ice to water to light; grief to love to joy to grief. A book made of questions. Endorsed by: Marcia Bjornerud (geologist), Julie Carr (poet), Natalie Eilbert (poet), and Nina Elder (visual artist).
Light / Remains
Cyanotypes, poems, and essays exploring geologic and intergenerational time. Featuring images from the Light / Remains visual series (2020–2022).
Community pigment-making workshops are open to everyone — no special skills required. Participants gather and transform materials from specific sites into pigments, while engaging in facilitated and spontaneous conversations about memory, inheritance, identity, and place.
Community Pigment-Making Workshops
Open community workshops in which foraged materials from project sites are transformed into natural pigments. Always full of camaraderie and laughter. Events have taken place in Kraków, Portland, Summer Lake, and elsewhere.
"In this Place" — FestivALT collaboration
An ongoing collaborative project with FestivALT and the community of Kraków. Pigment-making workshops at KL Płaszów, building on the community garden of medicinal plants established in 2018, in which 18 plant species were relocated from Płaszów and tended by neighbors.
Pigment + Place — PLAYA, Summer Lake
A 10-night immersive workshop/residency with Heidi Gustafson. Open to all levels of pigment experience.
Register →Paintings and cyanotypes made with natural pigments foraged from project sites. Many works draw on pigments from multiple sites simultaneously — pressing Arctic stone against Płaszów limestone, mixing iron from an old Arctic hunting camp with iron scraps from a Birkenau bunker.
echo)zero(stone
Circular paintings made of stones, flowers, and wild waters — each circle an ecosystem in flux, a zero of infinite and failed logic, a homeward gesture cast backward and forward in time.
Light / Remains — cyanotype series
A roving series of cyanotypes exploring geologic and intergenerational time. The primary pigment, Prussian Blue, is made from prussic acid — a key component of Zyklon B, the lethal gas used in Nazi death camps.
Individual paintings — titles to be added
A number of individual paintings are part of this project. Titles and site attributions to be added. Images currently on the current project page.
Poem films weave together moving image, language, and sound.
Protocols 14 + 15
A poem film drawn from Protocols: An Erasure. Published in Otiyot, August 2025.
Watch →Additional poem films in production
More poem films are in development as part of this project.
Sculptures made from materials gathered at project sites.
Sculptures — titles to be added
Several sculptures are part of this project. Titles, descriptions, and site attributions to be added. Images currently on the current project page. More sculptures in production.
Series of 18 paintings · 2018–2022
Desire lines are paths that follow the shortest or easiest route between an origin and a destination. Desire connects. The works in this series are about connection and the innate human desire for inter-dependency despite powerful cultural messaging to the contrary. They are also about being diasporic, which means that I'm constantly seeking home while also wanting to wander.
Eggs, rainwater, bones, rocks, and flowers are sourced from specific places and are used to make these paintings. On the topography of the paper, these materials strive to encounter each other like rivers or living veins. I don't mean this metaphorically. Driven by gravity and capillary action, they seek each other out, creating new combinations and forms.
These works are an experiment in listening, translating, and choreographing the roving desire of the material world.
Selected Exhibitions
"Dimensions," Building 5, NW Marine Artworks, Portland, OR (2025)
"The Works 2," Round Weather Gallery, Oakland, CA (2022)
"The Works," Round Weather Gallery, Oakland, CA (2022)
"Remembrance of Things Paper," Round Weather Gallery, Oakland, CA (2021)
"From the Ground Up," Art/Lab, Portland, OR (2022)
"Living Laboratory of Art & Ecology," Terrain Gallery, Spokane, WA (2022)
"Deep Looking," Saranac Art Project, Spokane, WA (2022)
18 works · click any painting to view details
Cyanotype series · 2020–2022
Light / Remains is a roving series of cyanotypes exploring geologic and intergenerational time using light, found pigment, and found forms. A forthcoming book of the same name draws on this series alongside poems and essays.
Each work can be thought of as an x-ray of a place — a momentary reflection of vast, ongoing temporal and spatial relations. They are made in places significant to me: wild landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin, towns and cities in Transylvania and Poland, remote wildernesses in Alaska, archipelagos in the Arctic, canyons in the American Southwest.
The primary pigment in the cyanotype process is Prussian Blue, made of prussic acid — the same chemical at the core of Zyklon B, the lethal gas used in Nazi death camps. "Zyklon" translates to "cyclone"; the "B" stands for Blausäure, "blue acid," synonymous with prussic acid. Some death camp bunkers bear traces of the same arrestingly vivid blue that characterizes cyanotypes.
All four of my grandparents survived death and labor camps during the Holocaust. Both of my grandmothers, Rosalie and Olga, survived Auschwitz. These works are a record of ongoing diaspora, trauma, and healing — tokens of transformation, attempts to shift trauma to love. Each one is a prayer, a trace, an homage, an elegy.
The sun is my primary collaborator on this project. I also work with the varied animacies — pigments, stones, wings, plants, branches — that I collect in the places these images are made. They are barely-stilled transitions. Like light, they feel like they might shift at any moment.
Works in Series
Jemez Springs, 2020 — LR 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 · Ferric compounds, natural and synthetic pigments, Jemez hot springs water
Oregon Outback / Great Basin, 2022 — LR 12, 13, 14 · 11 × 30"
Eastern Europe, 2022 — LR 16–23 · 4 × 6", 2-sided, poem on recto
Pacific NW / Great Basin, 2022 — LR 24–31 · 4 × 6", 2-sided, poem on recto
Great Basin large works, 2022 — LR 32, 33 · 22.5 × 30"
Cascadia, 2022 — LR 34, 35 · 9 × 12"
Selected works · click any image to view details
Series of 8 paintings · 2013–2015
An actant is that which acts, that which exerts force or intent. An actant creates action. The minerals in your phone, the carrot you ate for lunch, the color of the carrot — all exert force upon the world. A human body, too, is an actant, or more precisely, a conglomeration of interdependent actants.
This series of paintings explores pigment, color, and flowers as actants — forces that act upon and reshape the world just as a mineral, a carrot, or a human body does.
Selected Exhibitions
"Actant," People's Gallery, Portland, OR (2015) (solo)
"Actant," Providence Portland Community Gallery, Portland, OR (2014) (solo)
"Environmental Impact Statement," Surplus Space, Portland, OR (2015)
"Summer Field Studies," Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2014)
"Faculty Biennial Show," Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR (2013)
8 works · click any painting to view details
Series of 13 paintings · 2022–2024
These paintings are made of stones, flowers, and wild waters: materials that hold the earth's memory.
Each round shape in this work is an ecosystem in flux, in crisis, in homeostasis. The painting is their ecosystems, linked.
The circles can also be seen as stone-shapes; stones are the material embodiment of Jewish mourning.
The circles are also zeros: an infinity, a site where our capacity for logic fails and something else takes hold.
I'm trying, in this work, to love outward, backward and forward in time and space, to make home-places for my ancestors and future ancestors. Sometimes it feels like it works.
Medium
Natural and synthetic pigments, rainwater, and riverwater on paper
Collections
The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (Portland, OR)
North Star Civic Foundation (Portland, OR)
Selected Exhibitions
"Collecting Forward: New Acquisitions from Jewish Artists in Oregon" Oregon Jewish Museum, Portland, OR (2024)
"Tikvah: Hope in the Dark" Art/Lab, Portland, OR (2024)
"In the Flow: Art, Ecology and Pedagogy" Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA (2023)
"Landing" Wells College, Ithaca, NY (2023)
"Concentric Dance" Kolva-Sullivan Gallery, Spokane, WA (2025, with Bradd Skubinna and Josh Hobson)
Selected Press
All Classical Radio Artist Anthology: 40 Creatives of the Pacific Northwest, Featured artist (2025)
"Flowering in Tar" Oregon Humanities, Spring 2025
"How to Build a Kite" Oregon Humanities, Fall/Winter 2021
10 works · click any painting to view details
Series of 31 paintings · 2017–2025 · Completed
Every shape in these paintings is the shape of newly exposed ground near glaciers — land permanently covered by glaciers until the climate uncovered it.
This new earth is like a wound. When a wound occurs, the body instantly begins its healing. These wound-shapes create difficult beauty that invites mourning, critical awareness, and renewed forms of healing and care.
Whenever possible, each painting's pigments are sourced from the places represented in the painting — stones, bones, and plants, plus water from glaciers, rivers, and lakes. The materials I use are themselves bearers of meaning; they don't just symbolize the earth's memory — they are that memory. I intentionally mix these natural pigments with synthetic pigments, exploring our post-natural present.
These abstract maps are drawn from NASA satellite imagery and scientific data, but their purpose is not to re-present familiar climate facts — it is to make space for the emotional, psychological, and spiritual weight of those facts: the grief, fear, wonder, and rage that climate chaos elicits. These paintings led directly to Memory of a Larger Mind.
Medium
Natural and synthetic pigments, rainwater, glacial melt, and river water on paper
Collections
The City of Portland, Oregon
Whitworth University (Spokane, WA)
North Star Civic Foundation (Portland, OR)
Selected Exhibitions
"Transformation / Reclamation" The Art Center, Corvallis, OR (two-person with Lee Running, 2024)
"CHORUS" Round Weather Gallery, Oakland, CA (solo, 2023)
"The Glacier is a Being" Ahoi Gallery, Luzerne, Switzerland (two-person with Julian Stettler, 2023)
"Wild Pigment Project" University Art Museum, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM (2022)
"The Works 2" Round Weather Gallery, Oakland, CA (2022)
"Living Laboratory of Art & Ecology" Terrain Gallery, Spokane, WA (2022)
"Deep Looking" Saranac Art Project, Spokane, WA (2022)
"Sitka Art Invitational" Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR (2022)
"the shimmer" Astoria Visual Arts, Astoria, OR (two-person with Tia Factor, 2021)
"Edge and Mirror: Landscape in the Anthropocene" Center for the Visual Arts, Boise State University (2019)
"Vanishing Point" Vernissage Fine Art, Portland, OR (three-person with Camille Seaman and Nina Elder, 2018)
"Creative Climate Awards Show" Human Impacts Institute, New York City, NY (2018)
Selected Press
Los Angeles Times, front page →
Oregon Public Broadcasting, Art Beat artist profile (2022) →
"Daniela Naomi Molnar," Oregon Encyclopedia →
Featured Artist, Sixth Oregon Climate Assessment, Oregon State University (2023)
Buckman Journal: Broad Spectrum, paintings and poems (Summer 2023)
Climate Change and Happiness podcast →
"Mourning climate loss" by Jennifer Atkinson, CSPA Quarterly (Spring 2021)
"Understanding our relationship with mutations, kin and hybrid bodies" Chatter Marks Podcast, Anchorage Museum (May 2021)
"Climate Grief and Embracing Beautiful Confusion: Daniela Molnar Interviewed" Variable West (November 2020)
"You Aren't Alone In Grieving The Climate Crisis" Science Friday (April 2020)
30 works · click any painting to view details