Rose Salane: Afterlife in Public
August 29 - December 10, 2026
The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, and Converge 45 present Afterlife in Public, a newly commissioned exhibition featuring a multi-channel video installation developed in Portland by artist Rose Salane.
In February 2026, Salane brought a pair of white heels that belonged to the late Diana, Princess of Wales to Portland, Oregon. The auction house that originally sold Salane the shoes indicated that Princess Diana wore the heels on a humanitarian trip to an English school in Jakarta, Indonesia in 1989. On February 27, Salane engaged the Portland public by featuring the shoes in a magic show in collaboration with the All American Magic Shop & Theater at Lloyd Center Mall. On February 28, Salane invited the city of Portland to a public viewing at Pioneer Place Mall where visitors were able to touch Princess Diana’s shoes and reflect on her legacy. Salane and her team filmed both events for the exhibition.
In Afterlife in Public, Salane uses documentary-style filming to shine an intimate light on how the Portland public engages with memory, belief, iconography, and absence. A pair of shoes worn by the late Princess Diana acts as both an object that creates contact and a prism of spectacles amid the fading interior of Portland's notable malls: Lloyd Center and Pioneer Place.
One sequence of the film takes place within Lloyd Center's All American Magic Theater, a surviving magic shop operated by Mark Bentheimer, former corporate magician for Philip Morris and the official magician of the Portland Trail Blazers. Princess Diana’s shoes become the subject of a disappearing act at the theater’s monthly magic show. Salane and Bentheimer commissioned a notable illusion builder from Las Vegas, Dave Pavlov, to create a disappearing box specifically for the Princess’s shoes. In the first act, Princess Diana’s shoes appear in an empty shoe box. The audience is asked to throw fake dust into the box to help the shoes appear again. In the second act, the shoes reappear and then vanish into the commissioned illusion, forever. Bentheimer’s magic shop, filled with objects, inquiry, and theatrical activity is set in contrast to its host, Lloyd Center, a mall that was once a prominent gathering site for the city of Portland. With permanent closure and demolition looming over the mall’s future, Salane invites the performance with Princess Diana’s shoes at the All American Magic Theater in Lloyd Center to speak about the complexities of our fading relationships to an “in real life” experience.
The second sequence of the film features the public viewing of Princess Diana’s shoes in a vacant department store at Pioneer Place Mall. On September 1, 1997, the day after Princess Diana’s passing, hundreds of Portlanders gathered at Pioneer Place, a historic public square by the mall to mourn the Princess's passing. Princess Diana never visited Portland, but she was remembered with great feeling, and Portlanders’ support has been recorded across archival footage from KGW, Portland’s local news station. The film shows the attendees lined up to view the shoes in the vacant store. Their impressions drift between remembering and speculating, describing intimacy and distance and confession. Some visitors describe Diana’s royalty, or her celebrity, her childhood, her authenticity; others speak of the uncanny feeling of tangible proximity to an inaccessible history through an object. Each is a provisional, individual story that embraces a collective response.
At the heart of Afterlife in Public, Salane asks us to consider how objects can help facilitate public engagements between specter, spectator, and spectacle. The emptied storefront, the relic of celebrity, the staged illusion, and the mundane artifact each expose the invisible economies through which belief continues to circulate after institutions have lost their authority. Salane explained to the Oregonian, “As an artist, I am interested in how a historical object can create possibilities for shared moments of reflection when the object is placed in public, outside of the museum. Giving the residents of Portland the opportunity to touch shoes worn by Princess Diana will reopen collective perspectives of nostalgia, loss, and time, redefining the object’s historical value.”
ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø the Artist
Rose Salane (b. 1992, New York, USA) uses seemingly mundane objects to explicate systems of evaluation, exchange, and organization that shape daily life. In her practice she studies how an object or group of objects can narrate lived experience through the forces that have granted their preservation. Selecting collected and discarded objects from archives both institutional and personal, Salane imbues the objects with a greater narrative, one that materializes complex relationships between an individual, a site, and a collectively lived experience.
Salane’s recent solo exhibitions include: Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Athenaeum, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Athens; TANK, Shanghai; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Mass MoCA, Massachusetts; Villa Medici, Rome; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. In 2021, Salane’s work was featured in the New Museum Triennial “Soft Water Hard Stone,” New Museum, New York, and in 2022 at the Whitney Biennial, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2026, her work was included in the 61st Venice Biennale, “Minor Keys.” Salane completed her MA in Urban Planning at Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, CUNY and her BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
Converge 45
This exhibition is part of the 2026 Converge 45 citywide triennial Here, To you, Now. Curated by Lumi Tan, this iteration of the triennial opens August 27, 2026 with a weekend of receptions, performances, screenings, and talks at 16 venues throughout Portland. Inspired by the writing of Portland literary icon Ursula K. Le Guin, the triennial features 28 artists and 17 new commissions that activate the city as a shared stage for discovery, dialogue, and connection.