Derek Franklin is the Artistic Director of Converge 45 and Founder of SE Cooper Contemporary in Portland, Oregon, while concurrently maintaining his own full-time studio practice. As an artist, Franklin has exhibited his paintings and sculptures for more than twenty years. Selected solo presentations of his work include Meditation Furniture for Ten Minute Breaks (Document, Chicago); grief is on my calendar everyday at 2pm, (Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland); and Mending Capers (Thierry Goldberg, New York). Franklin’s recent work has also been presented in group exhibitions at Simone Subal (New York), Performa Biennial (New York), Melanie Flood Projects (Portland), and The Center for Creative Research (Oregon).
After receiving his MFA from Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University, in 2012, Franklin soon became Director of Soloway Gallery, an esteemed artist-run space in Brooklyn, NY, before eventually returning home, in 2017, to the Pacific Northwest. There, he continued to paint and pursue his art, began teaching at local schools and universities, and embarked on preparations to open his own gallery/residency program, SE Cooper Contemporary, to capitalize on the region’s relative isolation from other urban centers, its freedom from the strictures of prevailing cosmopolitan discourse.
On the heels of the pandemic, in 2022, Franklin took the reins of Converge 45, Portland’s citywide Triennial, to produce its third and most promising iteration to date, Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship, in collaboration with curator Christian Viveros-Fauné, hosting over sixty artists at seventeen different venues, and attracting over 80,000 viewers to the city. Currently, Franklin is working alongside renowned curator Lumi Tan on the next edition of Converge 45 to debut in 2026.