Statement & Resume

Paintings

Reviews

Books

"Under the Orange Clouds," oil on panel, 4" x 6"

In recent years, my artwork has developed into two different directions. One body of work focuses on the celebration of and advocacy for the planting of native flowers. Ancient Flowers is the studio-based, interior-facing manifestation of this idea. In Ancient Flowers, I layer images of native blooms grown in my own garden and in gardens around Kansas City. Painted with close attention to the architecture of the flowers, these paintings are intensely saturated and disorientating as I stack blossoms on top of one another compositionally. I want viewers to fall in love with wildflowers in the hopes that they will begin to recognize them, and perhaps even plant them in their own landscapes.

Flowers For Marlborough is the site-specific, public facing variation of this project. In Flowers For Marlborough, I paint and install large acrylic paintings on Tyvek of native plants on the boarded up windows of vacant buildings in the blighted neighborhood of Marlborough, Kansas City, where I live. This project, done with permission from the properties’ owners, seeks to call attention to the environmental and urban decay of my neighborhood that was once lush prairie. I want to introduce the formal and purposeful beauty of native plants to my neighbors, as well as offer a kind of psychological relief to my community who face the effects of living in the ugly aftermath of Kansas City’s racist policy of redlining. As part of this project, I winter sow native plant seedlings to give away to my neighbors in the spring, so they can experience the joy of living with the plants and the amazing pollinators they host. I also do painting workshops with neighborhood children, teaching them about the importance of native plants and using art as a way to create a communal appreciation for them. It is my hope that Marlborough can become known not for its blight, but for its stewardship of native plants and pollinators.

Urgent Experiments in Tending is an ongoing series of improvisational installations that explore the complex interweaving of the roles of mother and artist, as well as the anxieties I feel raising children in the anthropocene. In these pieces, I bring together intimate oil paintings on Yupo of my children and my plants, with live plants, often in stages of propagation, to explore the impulse to love and care for living beings, the amazement at cycles of growth and regeneration, and the interconnection between humans and plants. The presence of grow lights and electrical cords, as well as blue painters tape that attaches some of the paintings to the wall, are signs of improvisation and adaptation, survival skills for all living things, especially during this time of ongoing and amplified climate crisis. The eco prints of native plants and propagating succulents emphasize the transitional and ephemeral nature of raising kids and tending to the ecosystems in which we live. The fading dye in the ecoprints is also a metaphor for the natural loss inherent in growth, babies become children and then adults, succulent leaves will spawn new plants, dying in the process.

RESUME:

2000

M.F.A., summa cum laude, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL

Rosser Faculty Biennial Fellowship Award
Sabbatical, Spring Semester, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO

Faculty Grant, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO

Faculty Grant, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO

Flowers For Marlborough, Marlborough Elementary School, Kansas City, MO
Flowers For Marlborough, 1157 E 77th Terrace, Mar 14- May 1, Kansas City, MO

Group Exhibitions:

Editions Artists Books Fair, 2011, New York, NY, represented by White Wings Press of Chicago IL

Emblazoned Cyphers, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Lincoln, NE

Body of Work: New Perspectives on Figure Painting, National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.

Popular Culture Re-Constructed, Memorial Hall Gallery, RISD, Rhode Island, DE

Paper Now, Ispace Gallery, Chicago, IL

25^th Anniversary Bookplate Show, Printworks Gallery, Chicago, IL

Summer Love, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL

Out of Afar(m) and Whoa! La Giaconda, set design and live video installation for Whoa! La Giaconda, Merce Cunningham Studios, New York, NY

KSHB News, Artist Uses Native Flower Paintings to Highlight KC Neighborhood Issues, May 12, 2021
KMBC News, Kansas City Artist Works to Beautify Her Neighborhood,  May 5, 2021

Radar Online Poetry Magazine, Issues 9, January, 2016, and Issue 10, April, 2016
Art LTd Magazine, Robin Duran, p 31

2011

2010

ereview.org, Julie Farstad: Post-philosophy, A profile of a painter with many talents to choose from
Janell Meador, September 17, 2010

Chicagoartmagazine.com, Phyllis Bramson’s Painters at The Art Center in Highland Park,
Robin Dluzen, September 11, 2010           

2008

2007

2006

2002 -2004

2003

Chicago Tribune Alan Artner,, section 7C, p. 29 October 24, 2003