Bio
Ann Shostrom has shown internationally at galleries and museums. She is represented by Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York. Her most recent show, “Harvest,” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, was reviewed in Art in America in May 2011. Other solo shows include Kunstraum Dadapost, Berlin, Germany, Stephanie Theodore, Gallery, New York, NY, Lindhart Foundation, Prague, CZ, Art Now, Goteborg, Sweden, and Rule Gallery, Denver, Colorado. Shostrom is included in “Selections by the International Collage Center,” an exhibition of collage and mixed-media touring museums and galleries.
Shostrom’s paintings operate within the seams of fine art and craft traditions. Fabrics and household linens are dyed, painted, embroidered, and sewn together. Her wax resist methods include melting by blowtorch, burning votive candles, and drawing with traditional tools. She joins formalist abstraction to the history of domestic labor and craft. By sewing one tradition into another, weaving across formal boundaries, she makes art from remnants and ruins, repairing and reconstructing as she works.
Shostrom collaborated on a public art project in Shkodra, Albania, sponsored by the Albanian Ministry of Defense, and the Tirana Academy of Art. The sculptures and pavilion, made from decommissioned Cold War Era weapons, were installed in a public park across from the municipal offices.
She founded First Street Green, transforming a derelict New York City lot into a Culture Park, with its first season of programming in 2012. FSG’s efforts led to hosting the first BMW Guggenheim Lab at the lot in 2011. FSG has won grants from BMW, the Citizen’s Committee for NYC, Partnership for Parks, and Penn State’s Institute for Arts and Humanities and College of Arts and Architecture.
She received a Mid Atlantic Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for painting in 1989, and a New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant in 1978. Shostrom participated in MIR 2, a multimedia installation and performance at Smack Mellon that used the international space station as a model for a collaborative project. The MIR 2 team won the Dance Theater Workshop’s 2002 Bessie award for Performance, Installation and New Media. Reviews included The New York Times and Art Forum. Work continued on a new “colony” when MIR 2 found a home at the Islip Museum in Islip, New York.
She received a College Faculty Research Grant from Penn State in 2001 to develop Trunk Show, a series of international exchange exhibitions that traveled to the Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University in Whitechapel. In Ireland, it went to Kings House, Leitram/Roscommon, and Sirius Art Centre, Cohb, where she did a residency.
Archipelago, a collaborative installation she organized, was first made at Arti et Amicitciae in Amsterdam in 1999, and then recreated for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver Colorado, in summer of 2002. Archipelago was on the Denver Post‘s “10 Best Exhibitions of 2002 in Colorado” list. Attendance broke MCA records and the show was extensively reviewed.
Born in Chicago, she has a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Syracuse University. Shostrom lives and works in New York City and Pennsylvania, where she is an Assistant Professor at Penn State.