Laurie Russell

Mixed media artist Laurie Russell earned her BA and MA from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and her MFA from the University of Memphis in Tennessee. She has lived and worked in Brooklyn since 1985.

Over the years her work has evolved and focused on the mundane as a inspiration for making art. Russell has been attracted to the everyday, the plain, and the commonplace rather than the heroic, the monumental, or the gorgeous. Some of her subjects have been rocks, household cleaning products, vacuum cleaner parts, parking meters, road signs, and commonly uttered phrases. She has alternated between using paint as medium and using other materials, such as papier mâché, animal bones, found objects and, most recently plastic bags and yarn. With the ubiquitous plastic bags accumulated from grocery stores and other commercial establishments, Laurie Russell creates wall reliefs created using yarn to sew the bags onto burlap that is stretched over a frame. The plastic bags have varying degrees of transparency which allows her to combine colors in layers, thus enriching them, and to play with the text and graphics on the bags. Laurie Russell explains, “The bags, too, are fraught with contemporary content—as symbols of consumerism, eco-consciousness, and carbon foot printing.”

Russell has exhibited consistently with the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC)  and at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (WAH Center), as well as numerous exhibitions in New York and Pennsylvania. Her work is in public and private collections including the Yuko Nii Foundation’s permanent collection, and the Annette Cheref collection in Bovenden, Germany.

Website: laurierussellart.com

Exhibitions

July 1 - 28, 2021
The Small Works Show

July 9 – 29, 2020
Summer Selection

June 10 – July 8, 2020
Consolations