Ellen Lesperance (born 1971) is an American artist and educator, known for her paintings. Her works are typically gouache paintings that pattern the full-body garments of female activists engaged in Direct Action protests. She is based in
Portland
Portland most commonly refers to:
* Portland, Oregon, the largest city in the state of Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States
* Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state of Maine, in the New England region of the northeas ...
Ellen Lesperance employs various art mediums, but she often relies upon the visual language of knitting patterning. 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." 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.Rattemeyer, Christian (2013). ''Vitamin D2: New Perspectives in Drawing''. Phaidon Press. . She sources these historic garments from archival images and film footage of women involved in
Direct Action
Direct action originated as a political activist term for economic and political acts in which the actors use their power (e.g. economic or physical) to directly reach certain goals of interest, in contrast to those actions that appeal to oth ...
1999 Seattle WTO protests
The 1999 Seattle WTO protests, sometimes referred to as the Battle of Seattle, were a series of protests surrounding the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999, when members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) convened at the Washington State Con ...
, Earth First!, Occupy events, feminist-era protest events, and the feminist art canon. 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." In a 2018 review for ''Artforum'', Claire Lehmann describes the paintings as "reanimations of agitators' attire." "Combining the aesthetic pleasure of color field painting, the inexplicable scopophilic compulsion inspired by grids, and the haptic quality of fiber arts into a single composition that also evokes a political tradition is no small feat," art historian R.H. Lossin writes of Lesperance's paintings.
She was an Assistant professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she resigned in 2016 after leading the failed unionization attempt of the school's adjunct faculty. She additionally chaired the Painting Department of the Maine College of Art.
She has received many awards including a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
Ford Family Foundation
Hallie Brown Ford (March 17, 1905 – June 4, 2007) was an American business person and philanthropist. A native of Oklahoma, she acquired her wealth in Oregon through the timber industry. As a philanthropist she made donations to many instit ...
Fellowship, a Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the Seattle Art Museum(2012), and a
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combine painting, Combines (1954–1964), a ...
Artist-as-Activist Grant. She is the author of ''Peace Camps'' (Container Corps, 2015) and ''Velvet Fist'' (2020). In 2022, she was named a 2022-2023 Fulbright Global Scholar as an unaffiliated independent scholar to conduct research titled Peace Women Knitwear: Greenham Common and Beyond in Australia, Italy and the U.K.
Lesperance is also the organizer of the sweater rental project ''Congratulations & Celebration,'' in which a recreation of a Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp jumper is mailed around the world to motivate acts of courage.
Exhibitions
Selected exhibitions include the following:
*2022 "Ellen Lesperance: Amazonknights" ICA Miami, Miami, FL
*2021 "Will There Be Womanly Times?" Hollybush Gardens Gallery, London, England
*2020 "Together we lie in ditches and in front of machines", Derek Eller Gallery, New York, New York
*2020 "Ellen Lesperance: Velvet Fist," Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland
*2019 "Dress Codes: Ellen Lesperance and Diane Simpson",
Frye Art Museum
The Frye Art Museum is a modern and contemporary art museum located in the First Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. It was founded in 1952 to house the collection of Charles and Emma Frye and has since grown to include rotating temporary ex ...
, Seattle, Washington
*2019 "Less Is A Bore: Maximalist Art & Design",
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is an art museum and exhibition space located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. The museum was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936. Since then it has gone through multiple na ...
, Massachusetts
*2019 "Feminist Histories: Artists After 2000",
São Paulo Museum of Art
The São Paulo Museum of Art ( pt, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, or ') is an art museum located on Paulista Avenue in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. It is well known for its headquarters, a 1968 concrete and glass structure designed by Lina Bo B ...
, São Paulo, Brazil
*2018 "Lily of the Arc Lights", Derek Eller Gallery, New York, New York
*2018 "Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance",
Nottingham Contemporary
Nottingham Contemporary (formerly known as the Centre for Contemporary Art Nottingham (CCAN)) is a contemporary art centre in the Lace Market area of Nottingham. The gallery opened in 2009.
The gallery describes its site as being "the oldest in ...
, Nottingham, England and
De La Warr Pavilion
The De La Warr Pavilion is a grade I listed building, located on the seafront at Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex, on the south coast of England.
The Modernist and International Style building was designed by the architects Erich Mendelsohn and Ser ...
, Bexhill-on-Sea, England
*2018 "Nashashibi/Skaer: Thinking Through Other Artists",
Tate Museum
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...
, St. Ives, England
*2017 "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon", New Museum, New York, New York
*2016 "Ellen Lesperance, Helen Mirra, Traversing",
Armory Center for the Arts The Armory Center for the Arts, also known as the Armory, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit visual arts organization located in Pasadena, California. The Armory provides community arts education programs for all ages and exhibitions of contemporary art, mo ...
, Pasadena, CA
*2015 "We Were Singing", Adams and Ollman Gallery, Portland, Oregon
*2014 "Thread Lines",
The Drawing Center
The Drawing Center is a Manhattan, New York, museum and a nonprofit exhibition space that focuses on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary.
History
The Drawing Center was founded by former assistant curator of drawings at ...
, New York, New York
Collections
Ellen Lesperance's work is included in the collections of:
* Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore
*
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...
, New York
*
Kadist
Kadist is an interdisciplinary contemporary arts organization with an international contemporary art collection. In addition to being a collecting body, Kadist hosts artists residencies and produces exhibitions, publications, and public events. ...
Foundation, San Francisco and Paris
* Everson Museum, Syracuse
*
Frye Art Museum
The Frye Art Museum is a modern and contemporary art museum located in the First Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. It was founded in 1952 to house the collection of Charles and Emma Frye and has since grown to include rotating temporary ex ...
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Perez Art Museum, Miami
*
Portland Art Museum
The Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, United States, was founded in 1892, making it one of the oldest art museums on the West Coast and seventh oldest in the US. Upon completion of the most recent renovations, the Portland Art Museum becam ...