About me:

I grew up in Maryland, in the suburbs of Washington, DC, but really, it was more rural than suburban back then. I can remember how impressed I was when my Mom ran out into the yard with a broom, to chase away cows that had escaped the neighboring farm. From a young age my siblings and I wandered unsupervised in the nearby fields and woods, and explored shallow caves along the river. Early on after moving there, we found bones on our property, and for a while called that spot Bone Hill.

Our parents told us they would pay for us to attend the University of Maryland, our state school, so that’s where I went. Amazingly, faculty at the time included systems art theorist Jack Burnham and feminist art historian Josephine Withers, as well as artists Claudia DeMonte, David Driscoll, Sam Gilliam, Nick Kruschenick, and Anne Truitt. They each were models for me on how to be an artist; art was central to their lives, an essential part of the wider culture, and they worked on it, through good times and bad. Anne Truitt’s iconic Daybook was published while I was taking one of her seminars. After getting my BA I spent a year working office jobs and trying to save a little money, and then moved to New York to attend Hunter College’s MFA program, while I continued to work temp office jobs to support myself. At Hunter I was lucky enough to study with artists Susan Crile, Ralph Humphrey, and Robert Swain, ceramicist Susan Peterson, and art historian Rosalind Krauss. After a while my former teacher Claudia DeMonte connected me with her gallery, Gracie Mansion Gallery, and soon I started working full time as a registrar. Full time work slowed my grad studies, and the two-year program took me three years to complete, but the education I received working at the gallery was incredible, and I got to know Gracie and her partner, Sur Rodney (Sur), as well as artists Judy Glantzman, Al Hansen, Peter Hujar, Stephen Lack, David Sandlin, Hope Sandrow, and David Wojnarowicz.

Following grad school I worked hard in the studio (aka the living room) while working for Gracie, and later returned to temp office work, as it gave me more time and paid more. Bill Arning included me in a group show at White Columns, and not long after Stephanie Theodore invited me to have a solo show in her gallery. The show was reviewed in Artforum and Stephanie sold everything. Later years included solo shows at Elizabeth Koury Gallery, Jack Tilton Gallery, Van Doren Waxter, and Galerie Von Lintel. In recent years I’ve had shows at Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, Praise Shadows Gallery in Boston, and the Philip Slein Gallery in Saint Louis.

A couple of my favorite shows at not for profit spaces include Liquid Terrain, 20 Years of Works on Paper by Eva Lundsager at the Sheldon Art Galleries in Saint Louis, and Elsewhere: Eva Lundsager at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, MD, where my show was held in conjunction with an exhibition of work by my former teacher, Anne Truitt, who grew up in Easton.

I’ve made two artist books: Ascendosphere, published by Regency Art Press, has no text, just reproductions of a series of watercolor and sumi ink drawings, full of brightly toxic colors and smoky atmosphere. More recently I created a beautiful zine with an essay by Yutong Shi titled Suspension of Disbelief: Timeless Horizons in the Art of Eva Lundsager; the zine also includes a poem by Jessica Baran, written in conversation with my work. My shows have received reviews in a number of publications, and I am grateful to those writers for finding words for the thoughts and sensations I can better describe with marks and images. I’m happy some of my work has found its way into permanent collections where I know it will be cared for and seen, including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Museum of Art, and the Whanki Foundation in Seoul. I owe much to the Guggenheim Foundation, whose support was so meaningful when my children were babies. Recently, I finally did my very first residency, something I wasn’t able to do while raising children, and I am grateful to MacDowell for a beautiful, productive month.

I miss those days when I lived in New York as a young artist, where I would run into an artist friend at Pearl Paint and end up with a spur of the moment exchange of studio visits. But I’ve met wonderful artists and art lovers everywhere I’ve lived; New Haven, St. Louis, and now Boston, where I’ve found a serious and warm art community. Most mornings, I start the day by making a drawing with my eyes closed, before I connect with the outer world, by opening my laptop to read the headlines. I teach two days a week, and spend the others in my studio. While I’m almost always alone in the studio, I share my mental space with artists from throughout history, solitary teenagers making things in their bedrooms, and the air that moves over our planet.

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