Pratt in Venice alumni have been busy creating and exhibiting work! Here’s a snapshot of what’s on:

Artist Anne Murray (PiV ‘94) has curated the Cloud 9 Pavilion as part of the 2020 Bangkok Biennial, which opened on October 31, 2020. Featuring the work of 30 artists, the Pavilion takes place online, and is accessible here.

The expression 'you are on Cloud 9' has been used to imply the incredible state of happiness of new love, while also implying 'you have your head in the clouds' meaning you are living in an impossible world positivity. Here artists use their critical vision, imagination, and curiosity to strive for something unimaginable and to shed new light on past, present, and future realities related to love, politics, and society.

In conjunction with the Pavilion, Anne Murray conducted an interview with exhibiting artist Michael Brennan, Pratt in Venice Painting Professor. Watch the video below:

Anne Murray earned a BFA at Parsons School of Design in Paris and an MFA and MS at Pratt Institute, and an MEd at The College of New Jersey Global Studies Program in Mallorca, Spain. Her work combines thoughts about Quantum mechanics, philosophy, poetry, song, photography, video, movement, and installation. She finds curiosity in the movement and stillness of rocks, octopuses, and trees. She advocates for a tectonic shift in perception and the upending of pre-established focal points to work towards a goal of meliorism and harmony in an environment shared with all matter. She has participated in exhibitions around the world including in Cf@The Research Pavilion, Venice Biennale, and the Mediterranean Biennial of Contemporary Art in Oran, Algeria.

Alumna Kelly Vetter (PiV ‘89) held a solo exhibition of recent work, Memento, at the Morris County Arts Workshop from October 1–November 6, 2020.

Born in Jersey City, raised in the post war asphalt places of the Garden state and receiving a BFA and MFA from Pratt Institute, Kelly is a self-described Tinker artist using found materials and symbolic imagery to create new narratives.

See more from the exhibition here.

Alumna Tiantian Ma (PiV ‘19) featured work in a group exhibition, Memory and Creativity Reflect the Present, Past, and Future, at Gallery 40, Poughkeepsie, New York. She held an artist talk in conjunction with the exhibition on October 10, 2020.

Chinese-born and New York-based, Tiantian received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute in 2020. Oil on canvas is her main medium.

Alumna Aubrey Roemer (PiV ‘18) showed a new body of work, Living Blue in a Red State, featured in the exhibition The Right to Vote curated by James Tyler at the GARNER Arts Center. She held a virtual in-studio visit, discussing her new work featured in the exhibition.

The series Living Blue in a Red State reflects artist Aubrey Roemer’s one year tenure of living, working, and traveling throughout the American South, after a lifetime as a Yankee. Roemer relocated to Tennessee to pursue her doctorate in Anthropology, focusing on the archaeology of prehistoric cave art in the Southeast. The intersection of art and science is apparent in this work: it documents trash and dying foliage that decorates a family lawn in Florida. This generational detritus is largely agricultural: pitchforks, hoe heads, antique Coke bottles, palms, etc. These modern-day relics and future artifacts were immortalized into a world that is symbolic of the socio-political discord and economic division currently ravaging the fabric of the United States of America. The images are hysterical in their color and constrained in their tightly stitched borders, effectively creating a quilted altarpiece of American chaos: rampant wildfires, protests, riots, a new plague, and contemporary demagoguery abound.

Aubrey earned a BFA and MFA from Pratt Institute, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, 42 Acres in England, and at Kio-a-Thau Sugar Refinery Artist Village in Taiwan. In 2016, she participated in NYU Tisch’s The Season Commedia dell’Arte in Florence, Italy, as an Assistant Art Collaborator. She has received grants from Do Your Part & Paddlers For Humanity, World Connect, and ARTwerk.

Alumni: do you have news to share? We’d love to hear it! Send a message to venice@pratt.edu!