Visual Arts Installation Artist
Home Partner: Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
E-mail: adrienneart@windstream.net
Phone: 724-327-0547 View Adrienne's Gallery
Artist Bio:
Educated at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Adrienne Heinrich has been awarded grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She is represented in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, the Heinz Endowments, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Montecatini, Italy.
Exhibiting yearly at galleries in New York City, Washington, D.C., Italy, and throughout Pennsylvania, Adrienne has been an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Seton Hill University and has taught at Touchstone Center for Crafts. Her work is represented in over 60 corporate collections and many private collections.
She has been awarded nine jurors' awards in the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Exhibitions held at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the two most recent in July 2010, and has developed a high school student outreach program for the AAP called Visual Arts Career Orientation. In 2002, she was awarded the honor of Pittsburgh Artist of the Year, which included a major exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
Statement by Artist:
"How I see this work:
"More specifically, my current work in cast silicone begins as I carve wood sculpture, from which I make a mold. The final silicone castings contain small objects from our everyday life, which float about in the interior. On the exterior of the solid casting, I paint or draw ancient symbols, linking the commonalities between peoples of all time.
"In the same media, but in a slightly different direction, I compose visual histories using artifacts, which carry their own mysterious stories and written documents separately obtained but related in some way. All are open to interpretation, but imply universal archives. These pieces can also be specifically archival, being commissioned by individuals or by groups or corporations.
"I also make organically shaped sculptures from reed and paper or from reed and fabric. Light is an important aspect in these pieces, which can take the shape of vessels or ships or unknown objects. These are often combined with whispered sounds.
"Periodically, I enjoy going back to making colorful abstract acrylic paintings on unstretched canvas. They are more playful in nature, but I think that the painting feeds the other media in a sort of rhythm. The paintings have many layers of texture and of paint, which emerge and recede. They reveal a history of their own, referring to a universal symbolic language.
"In celebrating the identity of individuals, I have been etching mirrors with words. The person who has commissioned the work provides the words. The mirror reflects the face of the individual as a visual and as a superimposed written image. As other people gaze into the mirror, they question their own identity by comparison.
"To sum up the direction of my work: I want to create work, which is intensely personal, in the hope of coming close to the truth in myself and in others. It is the work of a dreamer, but one of a dreamer rooted in the world."
~Adrienne Heinrich