Joe Thurston

Lead artist Joe Thurston’s studio sits below Onion Peak, near Neahkahnie Mountain on the north Oregon coast. He began working as a public artist in Portland in 2007. Early on he noticed how much civic art was being produced by designers and fabricators rather than by practicing artists working directly with the people a place holds, and that observation still governs his work. He has since completed more than twenty permanent commissions nationwide for municipalities, parks, libraries, universities, and state arts programs, along with several public art master plans, and his work has twice received Best in Public Art recognition from Americans for the Arts. He formed Site Specific LLC in 2014 on the conviction that public art should be artist led and made with a community, not delivered to it.

Lead Artist

Karina Salgado

Karina Salgado is the studio's design partner and has worked with Joe since 2018. Through her fifteen years as a designer and a lifelong creative, she has found a discipline that sits between art and explanation, centering on people and storytelling. Her work with Site Specific provides a cherished creative outlet, different from the design systems she creates as an Art Director with Renate, where she focuses on exhibit and environmental design. Within the Site Specific studio she leads research and outreach, learning a site and its people before any form is decided. She then collaborates with the team on concepts through execution, considering both the big picture and the details; every design choice must have purpose in its shape and material, while also guiding every project toward a visual narrative that a person can enter without instruction. Her contributions span all phases of the studio's commissions, among them The Size of Rhode Island, This Is Water, Objects in a Stream, Core Values, Local/Universal, and A Story for McCall.

Design Partner

Studio Manager

Kestrle Rafyfield-Foote

Kestrle Rayfield-Foote has managed studio operations since 2023. She holds a BS in botany from Oregon State University and a BA in interaction design from the Glasgow School of Art. Her background in arts administration comes from the Hoffman Center for the Art, where she served as administrative coordinator and later as visual arts program coordinator. She directs scheduling, workflow, and production, and keeps the multi-year timelines of permanent public commissions on track. She is also the studio's most exacting reader of a drawing, giving the hard, useful feedback that keeps the work honest before anything is built.

Fabrication Lead

Kari Merkl

is a partner of the studio and its fabrication lead, as well as its industrial designer, material specialist, and resident inventor. When a design calls for a component or a process that does not yet exist, she works out how to make it and how to make it repeatably. Much of what looks effortless in a finished installation exists because she solved it first at the bench.