ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
August 13 – 27, 2021
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann received her BA from Brown University and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, a Fulbright grant to Taiwan, the AIR Gallery and Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Fellowships in New York, NY, and the Arts and Humanities Grant, Mayor’s Award and Hamiltonian Fellowship in Washington, DC. Some of the venues where Mann has shown her work include the Walters Art Museum, American University Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, the Art Museum at SUNY Potsdam, the US consulate in Dubai, UAE, and the US embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon. Mann is currently an instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Artist Statment
My work’s abstractions arise from the subjects I portray: ecological and geological cycles, processes of chemical corrosion and natural efflorescence. With roots in traditions of Chinese landscape painting, my monumentally sized paintings and installations evolve a fantastic, abstract vision of the natural world. My latest work confronts the challenge: the resuscitation of landscape painting in a world where “landscape” is represented and defined through an ever-widening field of digital, graphic, and visual forms. How can a painting capture flux, abundance, waste, fertility, and the collision and collusion of diverse forms? How can it respond to the pressure we place on our era’s fragile ecosystem? My paintings explore both questions by sustaining tension between what is artificial and what is natural, between what is chemical and what is biological, between organic and inorganic. The paper on which I paint is not only a recognition of a tradition of Chinese painting; it is also a medium of vulnerability and expansiveness, susceptible to crease and tear as well as to collage and collation. My own role in the creation of the paintings strikes a balance between the purpose and the protective. I trust to process, chance, and change, but I encourage, direct, and facilitate all of these. In my most recent work, I hope to live in the tradition of landscape painting, experiencing it for what it has always been: an occasion for radical experimentation and confrontation with the world, in the broadest sense of the term, that sustains us.
Community Event
Post Residency Feedback
After a profoundly difficult last year and a half – struggling through life and loss in the pandemic, and the difficulty of balancing my studio work with the reality of parenting small children during Zoom school, Good Hart was the balm I, and my family, needed. I’m amazed and grateful to experience each day how shot through with love, thought and generosity this residency is.
I feel privileged to know this place, to have seen these sunsets and jumped in this lake every day and I’m excited to see how the textures of the stones on the beach have crept into my paintings. I hope they will never leave. I will carry this experience, and this place, with me always, and so will my family.