A. Laurie Palmer

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

A. Laurie Palmer’s interdisciplinary art practice includes sculpture, writing, public art, and collaborative projects. She has worked with the artists’ collective Haha for fifteen years, creating installations and interventions in everyday sites and social spaces. In recent projects, she has focused on real and potential uses for vacant urban land. In 3 Acres on the Lake, she collected speculative proposals for a small, publicly owned lakefront lot in Chicago, a site complicated by political corruption, racial histories, and radioactive substances.

At Radcliffe, Palmer will focus through writing and sculpture on an investigation of “land” as space and raw material. In the context of a world popularly perceived as shrinking and in which space and material resources are understood through economies of scarcity, the word “land” harbors residual notions of abundance, independence, wildness, and potentiality. Palmer wants to explore these residual values in relation to social, environmental, and political limits.

In 2001, Palmer received grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and from the ArtCouncil, San Francisco, and special project funding from the Driehaus Foundation and from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Her recent exhibitions include Critical Mass at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (2002); 3 Acres on the Lake at the Chicago Architecture Foundation and Gallery 312, Chicago (2001, 2002); and Air/Air at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco (2000). Palmer is currently associate professor in sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches sculpture, contemporary theory, and art writing.