Ellen Lesperance

1971, Portland, États-Unis

Ellen Lesperance (Minneapolis, United States, 1971) lives and works in Portland. Her work consists of gouache paintings on paper that revive and revisit historical knitted garments worn by engaged activists. Working from recovered photographs, the artist recreates the patterns of the protesters’ knits in grid-like weavings where each square corresponds to a stitch.

She has received numerous awards, including the Fulbright Scholarship (2022-2023), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant (2014-2015), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), the Ford Family Foundation Fellowship, a Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the Seattle Art Museum (2012), and an artist-as-activist grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.