Nicole Pietrantoni

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, the Manifest Prize, and the Graves Award for excellence in Humanities teaching and research. Her work has been in over 80 national and international exhibitions.

Nicole received her MFA and MA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa and her BS in Human and Organizational Development and Art History from Vanderbilt University. Nicole is currently the President of the Board of SGC International, North America's largest professional organization dedicated to education and scholarship in the field of printmaking.

Nicole regards both her professional practice and pedagogy as powerful sites for intellectual, artistic, and ethical transformation. She is committed to arts education and has been a visiting artist at colleges around the country to give workshops and speak about her work. Since 2012, Nicole has been an Assistant Professor of Art at Whitman College where she teaches printmaking and book arts. Nicole lives and works in Walla Walla, Washington, USA.

Artist Statement

"To be an artist working with print media today is to have a particular orientation towards replication, distribution, and representation. As printed matter is an increasingly ubiquitous part of our visual culture, printmaking as a fine art continues to expand and encompass a broadening definition. These complexities demand that I question how I see, picture, and frame the world around me.

Specifically, my artistic research and work examines the complex relationship between human beings and nature. While nature may be positioned as a neutral space, it is, in reality, a site of competing stories and representations. From the works of painters and early photographers to movies and tourism brochures, nature functions as a place of individual exploration and reverence, a site of resource and profit, and a respite from daily routines in the search for authentic experience. Inherent in any representation of nature is a simplification of its complexity.

To this end, I am guided in my research by the following questions: what stories shape my interaction with and understanding of landscape and nature? How have cultural and historical scripts, media, and technology disciplined me? How does a lineage of art history influence a particular way of picturing and making images? And finally, what stories do I contribute in my work as an artist to this discourse?

Combining digital and traditional printmaking techniques, these investigations culminate in installations, works on paper, and site-specific art. Rather than a fixed site or a single image, I seek to engage nature as an accumulation of processes, perceptions, and narratives – a dynamic and shifting site open for interpretation."

Artist CV