Victoria Tierney is an arts curator and painter who curated such shows as “TIME – A Statewide Traveling Show of Oregon Prison Art” and various shows from the Watercolor Society of Oregon, as well as “The MARK Series,” a group of portraits of her husband Mark Tierney, with whom she has lived in Bandon for 35 years. “The Mark Series” showed at the Coastal Oregon Visual Artists Showcase at the Newport Visual Arts Center in August-September 2012.
Tierney graduated from Berkeley in l963 with a degree in fine arts, then worked as an advertising artist for Cost Plus Imports in San Francisco. “We had to render everything they sold with nothing but a crow-quill pen; that’s where I really learned to draw,” Tierney recalls.
She was also art director for the New Haven Register Sunday Magazine in New Haven, assistant art director at New York Magazine, and record jacket designer for such artists as Ringo Starr, the Allmann Brothers, George Carlin, and Paul Williams in Los Angeles.
While in Los Angeles, she also was a West Coast correspondent for the Village Voice, and worked with feminist artist Judy Chicago on the WOMANHOUSE project which opened in L.A. in 1972. Tierney’s contribution to that project, “Nurturant Kitchen,” was featured at the Getty Museum in 2011 in “Pacific Standard Time,” a review of art in L.A. in the 1970s and ’80s.
Tierney came to Bandon in May of 1977 to stay with a friend, get away from the city, and finish illustrations for a children’s book. Her plan was to stay for two months. The book, “Dream of the Dinosaurs,” illustrating a dream her son had when he was seven years old, was published by Doubleday in l978. But Tierney never did return to L.A. Her friend, Mark Tierney, became her husband, and in the 35 years since, Victoria has become a mainstay of the art scene in southern Oregon.
She has been a member of the Watercolor Society of Oregon since 1996, and her paintings have been shown throughout the state at numerous venues (including galleries in Newport). She has curated shows for the Coos Art Museum, Harbortown Events Center in Bandon, and the Southern Coos Hospital & Health Center in Bandon, for whom she has organized at least four shows a year since the new facility opened in the year 2000.
She and her husband also became very involved with community theater, and Mark performed in “Murder in the Cathedral” when the Newport Performing Arts Center first opened, many years ago.