The link between the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Pacific Northwest is not obvious but is more sinister and direct than the general public may be aware of. Michael Brophy’s new series of paintings Reach: the Hanford Series, now on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Eugene, sheds light on the connection. 

In recent years, conversations surrounding the ethics of the atomic bombs and nuclear warfare have found their way into the mainstream almost 100 years after the initial bombings. Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster biopic, Oppenheimer, spurred many of these conversations. The film highlighted the activities of the Manhattan Project, labs in Los Alamos, New Mexico but left out the major role played by the Pacific Northwest in the drama: the plutonium for the atomic bombs was produced at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Eastern Washington. 

Built in 1943, the Hanford Nuclear Site ultimately housed nine reactors. The last reactor was shut down in 1987. What was once a small farming community blossomed into a leading plutonium manufacturer in the country before becoming a hazardous site in need of clean up. The site and its subsequent clean-up, overseen by the Department of Energy, have become a point of pride for local residents with tours offered. Artist Michael Brophy took one of these tours in 2017 at the invitation of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Brophy didn’t start making art about the experience for a few years; he wanted to give himself time to process and slowly address the artistic road ahead. 

“I knew I would address this experience eventually. I let it marinate in my mind” Brophy says.

He began the first paintings in 2021 all the while working on other projects. Two works in the Reach series were painted in 2021, two again in 2022. In 2023, Brophy went to Rome. The trip shifted his understanding of the project. After returning home, he revised the earlier completed paintings and made five new ones. 

Whilst in Rome, a different era of human advancement and violent political moves impressed themselves upon him in the Catholic Church. In the Vatican Museums, Brophy walked through the Hall of Maps, a room full of maps painted on the wall that the Catholic Church commissioned to denote the papal territories.

“I had been there in the mid 1990’s and remembered it differently. I thought there was stucco on the walls and was amazed at the use of trompe l’oeil and the colors. Deep blues.” After this visit, a burst of inspiration filled Brophy and he claims he made “the last four or five [paintings] quickly” based on his time in the Hall of Maps.

Reach: The Hanford Series was unveiled on February 1st, 2025 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) at the University of Oregon. The series of nine 78 x 84 inch paintings is based on the nine reactors at the nuclear site. The title of each painting starts with the word Reach. Individually and as a set, the paintings raise questions about the nature of temporality, memory, justice, erasure, and hubris- the reaching and overreaching of humankind for power.

“I try to incorporate three things into my work. An homage to nature, the machine and the garden (an interjection of what we’ve done as humans), and a fable or a tale” Brophy says. This implies that he tells stories while inserting commentaries on industrialism and its environmental impacts. This has been a theme in his works for decades. Tree Curtain from 2004 comments on the logging industry and its environmental impacts via the use of curtains, a traditional mode of presentation for 19th-century landscape painters like Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). Thus, we see an homage to nature (the landscape), the machine, and the garden (the logging industry), and a fable or a tale (the reference to traditional methods of painting) and Tree Curtain overall becomes a commentary on industrial and environmental impacts.

The development of the atomic bomb and the United States’ choice to deploy them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki continues to affect both the health of survivors and Japanese history at large. The use of nuclear energy is a deeply controversial topic among the American public and the Hanford Nuclear Site is emblematic of that controversy. The 580-mile-long site borders the Columbia River and is one of the most polluted areas in North America with over 53 million gallons of toxic waste created via the B Reactor- the world’s first large-scale plutonium plant. Throughout the Cold War, the nine reactors at the Hanford Site created the majority of the plutonium used in nuclear weapons.

The invitation to tour the site, along with cartoonist Joe Sacco, came with a “day or two notice” Brophy recalled. “I did not research the site before going though I had heard of it and the B Reactor. But I had no intentions”. The organization extending the invite, Physicians for Social Responsibility, is a nonprofit organization made up of physicians with a passion for protecting the United States from nuclear threats, nuclear toxicity, and environmental impact.

With no intentions, Brophy let the site tell him what it wanted him to see and eventually, paint. For Brophy “generally my idea is that paintings and pictures have a life of their own”. He lets his work speak to him to make it and speak for itself to the audience. 

The faultiness of memory permeates the series, Brophy described in his notes about the exhibit that he sees it as “raw data and emotional meaning” and “observed reality versus emotional reality”. This can be seen in paintings like Reach: Pay which not only has a stormy sky when in reality the day he went had blue skies but also in the small mushroom cloud in the back which certainly was not there when Brophy visited in 2017. He recognized a need in the image and fulfilled that even though it was not true to the actual experience.

“I thought the first four were done. I rolled them up and even photographed them. After Rome I pulled them out and added to them” Brophy said. 

Reach: Dominion is most directly inspired by the aforementioned Hall of Maps, specifically the Columbus Map. The painting depicts the small Hanford site, small but visible, at the bottom of the composition with the various factories pluming smoke by the Columbia River. In the right hand corner is a map of the Hanford site and in the blue sky is a red cartouche with gold beams emanating from it just as in the Columbus Map. Brophy’s version, however, lists the history of the B Reactor on the Hanford site in round hand, a script used for “graduations, weddings, that type of handwriting” the artist says. This is appropriate because the keepers and community see the Hanford site in a celebratory manner, Brophy describes the attitude as “we achieved this in a quick period of time”. Even the local high school has a mushroom cloud as the school mascot. According to Brophy, the tour guide mentioned progress and some regret with phrases like “‘hindsight is twenty-twenty’” and asking Brophy “‘So that was a pretty cool place, huh?’” according to his notes on the visit.

The title of Dominion draws on Brophy’s notes from the trip describing the Hall of Maps as the place where “the Pope could walk the long, bright corridor of his dominion”. Here, the conquering and colonizing practices of the Catholic Church are linked to the Hanford site and its colonizing and conquering of land through the name and use of cartouches. The similar cartouche directly links the images visually and the small map in the right-hand corner of Brophy’s image labels the painting as a sort of map once again connecting it to the Columbus Map through cartographic purpose. 

The name of Dominion for Brophy’s painting invokes his notes on the Hall of Maps and the imagery of the Pope walking through the maps and seeing his dominion. This would mean that, in a way, Reach: Dominion is Brophy positing the Hanford Site as an area one in power can walk through and feel that same sense of power, both geographically and militarily. It becomes an example of how humans reach for power in different ways, particularly in a world where weaponry and scientific advancement go hand in hand.

The specific connection to the Columbus Map with the cartouche brings in themes of colonization, both in terms of land and Indigenous peoples. Reach: Dominion can thus be understood as a sort of commentary on Westward Expansion, forcing viewers to think of the people left out of the Hanford story whose land was overtaken and polluted. Overall the maps mirror each other in “the reach, the hubris, the audacity to split the atom and create a new element, one that does not exist in nature” as Brophy says. Thus, Reach: Dominion is in many ways a representative of the series as a whole.

“To map is, in a way, to claim” Brophy says. The Catholic Church mapped its territories, the Pope’s dominion, and areas it claims power over. In many ways, the photographers and cartographers of the early 19th century came West to map and to claim. 

“People saw the West as a tabula rasa, ‘it’s beautiful but no one is here’. That’s why you have to look at what’s left out”, Brophy says. And with mapping in the West, because it was incorrectly seen as empty land, what was left out was the people who were living there. “Mapping in the West was inherently related to the transport of goods especially in the United States where there is a culture of money and capital.” 

Mapping can serve an economic purpose, ignoring those who live on and tend the land.. On the Hanford site, its original Indigenous residents were chased out and then the residents of the 1940s were once again kicked off the land so the government could make progress on the B-Reactor. This is why there are no figures to be found in Brophy’s paintings, the land was emptied of people multiple times. The natural landscape was taken over by industrialism and war. 

In Reach: Face, “There was a figure in the reactor painting of the face but it didn’t ring true so I took it out” the artist said. The name Face remains because the viewer faces the reactor and the large grid of rods becomes the reactor’s face we stare up at, the low horizon line (found in every painting) making the so-called reactor face seem all that much bigger. It becomes a presence and its own being. Here, the exclusion of people feels more powerful than if there was a person.

The absence of people is a presence and the ruins and products of man litter the paintings invoking Brophy’s “the garden and the machine”. 

“I consciously and unconsciously try to include an element of the uncanny in all my work” Brophy says. 

There are remnants and reminders of humans but none to be found creating a sense of the uncanny. In Reach: Dominion we see working factories with smoke coming out of them but no people around to show how they are operated. In Reach: Face we see the B-Reactor but no one is around to show people are working on it. In Reach: Mistake we see a demolished ranch house and a stable but no animals or people around to show it was ever inhabited. In Reach: Move we see the name of Move but there is no movement of people or nature, just dead twisting trees. Finally, in Reach: Pay we see an abandoned high school that once taught people and is now a desolate ruin. There is always an absence of people and life that makes these images slightly eerie.  

The uncanny threads through the series; there is an unnatural tinge to nature lent by the color yellow. All nine paintings have elements in yellow, some more obvious than others like Reach: Mistake which hosts a yellow flag in the upper lefthand corner. Others, however, are more subtle: in Reach: Trinity yellow letters in the right-hand corner spell “BOMB,” the word cuts through the clearing blue skies to warn that danger is near. Brophy explained that yellow became the color synonymous to him with nuclearization and its effects “not consciously” but due to its “radioactive color”. Perhaps the yellow color of industrial warning signs influenced him because yellow is associated with quarantine. Nonetheless, it became what Brophy used as an “unconscious” subtle warning to each viewer. 

The inclusion of words in the paintings is something Brophy has experimented with previously. Brophy recalls that “about 20 years ago I had a lot of writing in my paintings, flags too” which organically began to phase out of his works in the past couple of decades until this series. For the artist, creativity is “cyclical…you can’t escape your own voice.” And in listening to himself and the painting, he felt Reach: The Hanford Series needed flags and writing and once again they became a part of his repertoire as they once were so evident in his works 20 years ago.

In many ways this mirrors his writing about the Hanford Site itself: “Went not looking for anything in particular; saw what I didn’t expect to see.” the tagline of the JSMA exhibition. He began painting with no particular intentions and ended up with this series as it is.

Brophy encourages viewers to make their own assumptions about his works: “What people bring to them are equally as valid as what I think about them” he says. 

His artistic process is listening to himself, listening to the work, and finally listening to the audience and encouraging their interpretation. This is evidenced by his favorite quote from composer John Cage recounted by painter Philip Guston: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”

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Reach: The Hanford Series is on view at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene through April 27th. The museum is open 11:00 am – 8:00 pm on Wednesdays and from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm Thursdays through Sundays. Admission is $5 for adults and free for students/faculty and minors.