A B O U T
With a foundation in studio craft and painting and over 20 years experience organizing exhibitions, events and other cultural platforms, Shannon Stratton’s practice is a culmination of diffuse experiments and experiences borne out of an insatiable curiosity for the why and the how the world is processed by artists and makers.
Working in a primarily collaborative and context-responsive fashion, her practice always attempts to make sense of the interrelatedness of each expression: whether curating, making, teaching, writing, building and/or leading an arts organization, what ties this work together is an approach to problems as material, working and tending with what is at hand, embracing inventiveness and change, making and doing for the next generation, and learning to hold lightly one’s work in the hopes that it might be generative for others.
Stratton was trained in fiber and painting, with an MFA in studio art. In 2003 she co-founded the artist-run organization, Threewalls (Chicago), where she was artistic and then executive director for 12 years. At Threewalls, she organized exhibitions with over 100 artists, including Cauleen Smith, William Cordova, Claire Pentecost, Dani Leventhal, Betsy Odom, Edie Fake, Zach Cahill and Daniel Barrow. With Threewalls she co-created The Propeller Fund award in collaboration with Gallery 400 for artist’s self-organizing; conceived and published 4 volumes of PHONEBOOK, a national guide to grass-roots and artist-run organizations across the US; and co-organized the first Hand-in-Glove conference which would lead to the co-founding of Common Field (2013-2021), a national organization in support of artist-focused organizations.
In 2010 she co-curated the exhibition Gestures of Resistance with artist Judith Leemann at the former Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR. The exhibition examined craft as a verb, whose political power lies in its process, by presenting a group of artists who used craft as action in making performance, social practice and pedagogical work. Featuring Theaster Gates, Cat Mazza, Ehren Tool, Mung Lar Lam, Anthea Black, Carole Lung and Sara Black/John Preus.
From 2015-2019 she was Chief Curator at The Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Over her tenure at MAD, she launched the Burke Prize, 1st Site and programmed 35 exhibitions at MAD, including curating: Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care; Atmosphere for Enjoyment: Harry Bertoia’s Environment for Sound; Coille Hooven: Tell it By Heart; Roger Brown: Virtual Still Lifes; Ebony G. Patterson: …buried again to carry on growing; In Time: The Rhythm of the Workshop; Anne Lindberg: the eye’s level and Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound.
For 2019-2020 she worked with The John Michael Kohler Arts Center as the interim Senior Curator, developing the 2020 exhibition season On Being Here and There, curating the exhibitions Between You and Me, EDM House and Inscriptions of an Immense Theater. Prior to this position, she contributed the exhibition Even thread has a speech to the series Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe and An Encounter with Presence (Emory Blagdon, Harry Bertoia and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe) for the series The Road Less Travelled.
In 2014 she organized Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries for Threewalls, Chicago. The exhibition, the first retrospective of Wilding’s work, toured to Rhodes College, Memphis TN and The University of Clear Lake - Houston as well as being expanded for presentation at The Pasadena Armory for the Arts in California and The Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon. Stratton edited the monograph, Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries which is published by Intellect Books.
As an independent curator and writer she is hopeful to return to two projects that have been on the back-burner since COVID: Slow Frequency, a biannual, networked exhibition which takes the climate crisis as the imminent limit to the production of cultural events, and Software: an exhibition project about the connected intellectual and labor histories of the textiles and computer industries through both historical documents and art-works in the fields of fiber and digital media.
She is part of The Working Group for Unmaking, at The Poor Farm which explores alternative models to “organizations” and “institutions” for cultural production and presentation. That work has currently taken shape as Living Within The Play, a collaborative arts organism launched with Mark Jeffery, Kelly Kaczynski and Kelly Lloyd (2018-2022).
She teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now serves as the Director of the Post-Baccalaureate Certificate Program in Painting and Drawing. Previously she was core faculty in the Warren Wilson MA in Critical & Historical Craft Studies as well as a Critical Studies Fellow at The Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has written for artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, art journals and other publications throughout her career.
Today, her studio practice manifests in writing, painting, performative lectures and book projects. You can read more about her work under the +Projects tab.
Stratton is the Executive Director of Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, MI. She lives in Saugatuck and Chicago.
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