Visiting Artist: Jill Downen

October 22, 2009
Artist Lecture
Richmond Center for Visual Arts, room 2008
5:30 p.m.

Jill Downen is an interdisciplinary artist whose sculptural installations physically anthropomorphize architecture. Using plaster, concrete, lumber and other construction materials, Downen's art reveals architectural space not as a passive container of objects and bodies, but an active dimension of relative energies. Her installations offer viewer's an immersive experience to heighten awareness of space and the temporal nature of the body. Downen's accomplishments include residencies at the Cite International des Arts in Paris, MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation and Vermont Studio Center. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Her art has been reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, The New York Times, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Downen earned an MFA in sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis as a Danforth Scholar and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in painting and printmedia.