Carrie Iverson is an artist based in Dallas, Texas. Born and raised in rural Virginia, she received her BA from Yale University in 1994 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. The complexities of her rural upbringing continue to influence her approach to making work; shifting back and forth between the academic world of her parents and the working-class community of her school shaped her ongoing interest in presenting multiple stories simultaneously.*

This focus has led to innovative approaches to creating work: staging a community iron pour outside a former factory, collaborating with the maintenance crew in a government building, and installing a memorial to the casualties of the Iraq War in the windows of an empty warehouse. Her experimental mindset also extends to materials, from pioneering ways of combining printmaking with glass to using paper pulp and enamel undercoating as materials in their own right. At their heart, all her projects are driven by interacting with a specific place, from wallpapering a worker’s flat on Chicago’s south side to creating an evolving archive at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Her work is in many collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Additionally, she has been an artist in residence at the de Young Museum (San Francisco), KALA Art Institute (Berkeley), North Lands Creative Glass (Scotland), Seto Center for Glass and Ceramics (Japan), Pilchuck Glass School, Alberta College of Art and Design (Canada), and Glenfiddich (Scotland).

*Farmville Virginia’s former Robert Russa Moton High School, now a National Historic Landmark and museum, is the birthplace of America’s student-led civil rights revolution.

Read more on the Moton Museum website.

“My current focus is creating site-specific installations that are developed through careful research and community engagement; I am particularly interested in involving the public in an interactive way that unfolds in tandem with the creation of my work.

I would describe my artistic practice as simultaneously rigorous and flexible; I will research and document a topic that interests me and then use that material as a generative source to create my site-specific installations in a spontaneous and reactive way. I often develop my work to change depending on how it is viewed – sometimes this is as subtle as surface engraving that appears and disappears depending on the light. By adding this level of interaction, I hope to draw attention to how there is rarely one fixed visual experience but instead a series of encounters that shift depending on perspective.

In our current political environment, it has become increasingly important to me to actively involve the community where my work is made as a means to be socially responsible and to encourage creative reciprocity. I believe my role as an artist is to find meaningful ways to combine my interest in political activism with my studio practice, to address issues of the reliability of evidence and information from these two parallel tracks.”

-Carrie Iverson