Public Art & The Imprint of Place - Ann Tarantino
Statement: Across media ranging from murals and works on paper to painting, collage, and installation, I chart experiences of place and landscape—including the colors, patterns, light, shapes, and shadows found across the natural world and the built environment. Utilizing concepts from human geography, I study the patterns built by our individual and collective moments and decisions: legacies that shape the terrain. By highlighting these often overlooked patterns, I explore and learn from the imprint we leave upon the world around us. The primary materials I draw from include photographs, sketches, and maps—including immigration routes, population density, native flora and fauna, and topography—while my experiences with places I have lived, visited, and researched provide additional inspiration.
Bio: Ann Tarantino is a multimedia artist investigating the relationship of the natural world to the built environment. Through drawing, painting, installation and site-specific public art, she engages viewers in a dialogue around the relationship of landscapes to time, space, culture, and movement. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, with public art installations appearing in various settings including museums and galleries, botanical gardens, and city streets. A New England native, Tarantino spent her formative years near the ocean – a constant that continues to inform her experiences of the landscape and the form of her work. Movement through time and space have been ongoing fascinations as she has traveled back and forth between continents, living and working variously in Japan, Brazil, Europe, and the United States, with each landscape leaving a distinct imprint on her work.
Recent exhibitions and projects include a major public commissions for Pittsburgh’s Office of Public Art; a new installation created for the Pittsburgh International Airport; a public-scale painting commissioned by the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority’s DotART program; a solo exhibition of new paintings with Davis Editions (Phoenix, AZ); and large-scale exterior murals created throughout her current home state of Pennsylvania.
Tarantino was featured in New American Paintings in 2005 and 2007, and was a 2016-17 recipient of a Fulbright Core Scholar Award for artistic practice in Brazil. She earned an honors degree in Visual Arts from Brown University and her Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Painting from The Pennsylvania State University.