Nicole Pietrantoni
Walla Walla, Washington
Walla Walla, Washington
Bio: Nicole Pietrantoni’s artwork explores the complex relationship between human beings and nature via installations, artists’ books, and works on paper. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including a Fulbright to Iceland, a Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Grant, an Artist Trust Fellowship, a Larry Sommers Printmaking Fellowship, the Manifest Prize, and a Graves Award for Excellence in Humanities Teaching. Her work has been in over one hundred national and international exhibitions.
Pietrantoni received her BS in Human Organizational Development and Art History from Vanderbilt University and an MFA and MA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa. From 2016 to 2018 she served as the president of SGC International, North America’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to scholarship and education in the field of printmaking. The artist is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla WA, where she teaches printmaking and book arts.
Statement: My research and artistic work explore the complex relationship between human beings and nature through installations, prints, and artists’ books. I am interested in integrating the tradition of landscape photography and the tension between beautiful, picturesque images of nature and the near-constant threat of environmental change. With a specific interest in photography’s historic relationship to representation, these works draw attention to our active role in constructing and idealizing landscape.
Using the book form in experimental formats, these artworks reconsider how we read and access information, as well as how we reproduce, represent, and disseminate text and images. Rather than a fixed site or single image, the fragmented columns, pages, and text engage nature as an accumulation of processes, perceptions, and narratives--a dynamic and shifting site open for perpetual interpretation.
By referencing the encyclopedic, the nineteenth-century panorama, and the Romantic painting tradition, these large-scale installations invoke older modes of image-based representation. The works highlight the inaptness of these tropes in an increasingly fast-paced world.
Pietrantoni received her BS in Human Organizational Development and Art History from Vanderbilt University and an MFA and MA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa. From 2016 to 2018 she served as the president of SGC International, North America’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to scholarship and education in the field of printmaking. The artist is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla WA, where she teaches printmaking and book arts.
Statement: My research and artistic work explore the complex relationship between human beings and nature through installations, prints, and artists’ books. I am interested in integrating the tradition of landscape photography and the tension between beautiful, picturesque images of nature and the near-constant threat of environmental change. With a specific interest in photography’s historic relationship to representation, these works draw attention to our active role in constructing and idealizing landscape.
Using the book form in experimental formats, these artworks reconsider how we read and access information, as well as how we reproduce, represent, and disseminate text and images. Rather than a fixed site or single image, the fragmented columns, pages, and text engage nature as an accumulation of processes, perceptions, and narratives--a dynamic and shifting site open for perpetual interpretation.
By referencing the encyclopedic, the nineteenth-century panorama, and the Romantic painting tradition, these large-scale installations invoke older modes of image-based representation. The works highlight the inaptness of these tropes in an increasingly fast-paced world.