Ellen Lesperance

Ellen Lesperance (born 1971) is an American artist who frequently relies upon the visual vernacular of knitting to describe a female subject divorced from mainly male, Western figure painting traditions. Her works are typically gouache paintings that pattern the full-body garments of female activists engaged in Direct Action protests. [1] She is based in Portland, Oregon.

Ellen Lesperance
BornDecember 22, 1971
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
NationalityAmerican
EducationBFA, University of Washington

MFA, Rutgers University

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Websitehttp://www.ellenlesperance.com

Early life and education

Lesperance was born in Minneapolis and raised in Seattle. She attended Roosevelt High School, University of Washington School of Art (BFA 1995), Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (MFA 1999), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1999). [2]

Career and work

Ellen Lesperance employs various art mediums, but she often relies upon the visual language of knitting patterning.[3] In a 2017 article for Frieze magazine, Jen Kabat writes that Lesperance's work "transmits messages about history, feminism and labour through the art of knitting."[4] Citing inspiration from years of working as a pattern knitter for Vogue Knitting magazine, Bauhaus-era female weavers, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, and body-based feminist artists of the 1970s and 1980s, Lesperance's gouache paintings on paper can be followed as patterns to recreate historic knit garments.[5] She sources these historic garments from archival images and film footage of women involved in Direct Action protest, including women from: the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, Earth First!, Occupy events, feminist-era protest events, and the feminist art canon.[6] Through studying activists' visual strategies, Lesperance "recognized that Creative Direct Action provides a powerful model for politically-inclined artists... but unfortunately it is creative making that exists outside the purview of contemporary art."[7] In a 2018 review for Artforum, Claire Lehmann describes the paintings as "reanimations of agitators' attire." [8]

She has also taught at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Maine College of Art, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020)[9], a fellowship from the Pollack Krasner Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Ford Family Foundation, and Grants and Awards from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Art Matters, and the Puffin Foundation. She is the author of Peace Camps (Container Corps, 2015)[10] and Velvet Fist (2020) [11]

Lesperance is also the organizer of the sweater rental project Congratulations & Celebration[12], in which a recreation of a Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp jumper is mailed around the world to motivate acts of courage. [13]

Exhibitions

Selected exhibitions include the following.

  • 2020 "Ellen Lesperance: Velvet Fist," Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD [14]
  • 2019 "Dress Codes: Elen Lesperance and Diane Simpson", Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA [15]
  • 2019 "Less Is A Bore: Maximalist Art & Design", Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA [16]
  • 2019 "Feminist Histories: Artists After 2000", Museum of Art São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil [17]
  • 2018 "Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance", De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, UK
  • 2018 "Lily of the Arc Lights", Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY [18]
  • 2018 "New Materialism", Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2018 "Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection", Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
  • 2018 "Nashashibi/Skaer: Thinking Through Other Artists", Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, UK 2018
  • 2017 "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon", The New Museum, New York, NY
  • 2017 "Makers Catalogue", Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY 2017
  • 2017 "W.I.T.C.H. 1983", Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
  • 2017 "The Subjects", Crumpacker Library, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR
  • 2015 "We Were Singing", Adams and Ollman Gallery, Portland, OR
  • 2014 "You And I Are Earth", Adams and Ollman Gallery, Portland, OR
  • 2014 "Thread Lines", The Drawing Center, New York, NY 2014
  • 2013 "It’s Never Over", Ambach and Rice Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
  • 2013 "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live", Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR
  • 2011 "The Strong, Star-Bright Companions", Ambach & Rice Gallery, Seattle, WA
  • 2010 "Ellen Lesperance", Betty Bowen Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA
  • 2010 "The People’s Biennial", Traveling exhibition (2010-2011): The Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Dahl Arts Center, Rapid City, SD; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA
  • 2006 "Redykeulous", Participant, Inc., New York, NY
  • 2005 "Off the Grid", Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY
  • 2005 "Ellen Lesperance & Jeanine Oleson", Samson Projects, Boston, MA
  • 2002 "Over the River and Through the Woods", PS122 Gallery, New York, NY
  • 2001 "Domestic Culture: The Home in Visual Culture", Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, ME
  • 2000 "Deterritorialization of Process", Artists Space, New York, NY 2000


References
  1. "Ellen Lesperance". New York: Derek Eller Gallery. November 6, 2018.
  2. "ELLEN LESPERANCE". Portland, Oregon: Adams and Ollman. Retrieved 2019-12-09.
  3. "Ellen Lesperance (September 6 – October 7, 2018)". Derek Eller Gallary. Retrieved 2019-12-09.
  4. "Ellen Lesperance - Frieze". frieze.com.
  5. Rattemeyer, Christian (2013). Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing. Phaidon Press. ISBN 0714865281.
  6. "Ellen Lesperance - It's Never Over - Ambach and Rice - Los Angeles". Art Splash. 2013-02-16. Retrieved April 19, 2016.
  7. Rosenberg, Karen (January 8, 2016). "Knit, Purl, Protest: The Radical Feminist Stitchcraft of Ellen Lesperance". Art Space. Retrieved April 19, 2016.
  8. "Ellen Lesperance". Derek Eller Gallery. December 2018.
  9. https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/ellen-lesperance/. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  10. "Ellen Lesperance: The Subjects and W.I.T.C.H. 1985 (Aug 9, 2017 – Nov 5, 2017)". Portland Art Museum. Retrieved 2019-12-09.
  11. https://www.goodtroublemag.com/home/velvet-first-ellen-lesperance. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  12. https://bmoreart.com/2020/04/seeking-out-imperfection-with-ellen-lesperance.html. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  13. Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol. 44 No. 6, May/June 2017; (p. 33)
  14. https://brooklynrail.org/2020/03/artseen/Ellen-Lesperance-Velvet-Fist. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  15. https://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/7161/. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  16. https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/less-bore-maximalist-art-design. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  17. https://masp.org.br/en/exhibitions/feminist-histories. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  18. https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201810/ellen-lesperance-77811. Missing or empty |title= (help)
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