Bio
Anne Greenwood is an artist and educator living on the edge of a national park in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her inspiration comes from this type of blended landscape: the rough edges of a suburban yard, urban animals in human-dominated spaces, or the borders of wild parkland. Passionate about the natural world, her work creates personal natural histories, playing with the conventions of natural history display and collection. She fuses painting, drawing, found objects, and sculpture: the works are likely to include carefully crafted drawings, feathers, insects, a gold jewelry box, or dried flowers. Familiar animals such as opossums or common bird species ground the works in urban wildlife. These are the works of someone who delights in a nature that is here, next door, and underfoot.
She received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2019, was selected for the 2016 Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center, and for a two-person exhibition at the Historic Arkansas Museum in 2022.
Artist Statement
Like essayist Annie Dillard, I am “wandering awed on a splintered wreck” inside the natural world.
In particular, I’m attracted to places where the wild breaks into the domesticated and becomes mingled, a phenomenon scientific communities refer to as the wildland-urban interface or otherwise described as urban wildlife. Within this space, I want to reveal a non-idyllic natural world: one that lives, dies, changes, thrives, adapts. I want to unpick the assumption that wildlife is somewhere else; wildlife, the wild, is with us and around us.
All the flotsam and jetsam of nature, a beetle carcass, dried plants, bones are brought together with sculptures, antique objects, drawings, and paintings to create a personal natural history. I revel in the close looking inherent in detailed drawing. This looking is mated to a passion for the kind of collecting inherent in a children’s pocket of treasures: smooth rocks, feathers, a shiny button.
My works also toy with the ways we try to preserve nature. Painted specimens are juxtaposed against preserved ones, asking for comparison. A natural history museum’s bag of tricks are all there: dried specimens, resin or jarred specimens, and taxidermy. Accumulations of specimens are laid out as if for inspection, but then distorted, excised, or hidden. Many of my works bind together presence and absence, seeking to understand why we want to fix moments and experiences into the tangible.
Like Emily Dickinson, I feel that “Nature is a Haunted House— but Art— a House that tries to be haunted.”
Press
“Where the Wild Things Grow,” American Society of Botanical Artists, September 2022
“Interview with Artist Anne Greenwood” by Philip Mayeux, The Arkansas Art Scene Blog, August 29, 2022
“Still Life: Anne Greenwood and Lane Chapman” by Carey Voss, Historic Arkansas Museum, 2022
“The Venerable Monosyllable: The V Show Unfolds at Emergent Arts” by Stephanie Smittle, Arkansas Times, June 7, 2018
“An Inside Look at Tonight’s 58th Annual Delta Exhibition” AY Magazine, June 2016
MFA Thesis
MFA Thesis Text: Radical Empathy in the Anthropocene, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, 2019