Ellen Wallenstein
Ellen Wallenstein · Source: New York Artists Circle · Rights retained by the original rights holders
- Medium
- Paper
- Based in
- Sherman, Connecticut
- Practice
- Collage, Photography, Works on Paper
Ellen Wallenstein is a photographer, collage-maker, book artist, and a retired professor of art. She earned a BA in Art History from SUNY Stony Brook and an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute, where she was an Adjun… Full biography
Biography
Ellen Wallenstein is a photographer, collage-maker, book artist, and a retired professor of art. She earned a BA in Art History from SUNY Stony Brook and an MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute, where she was an Adjunct Full Professor in the Photography Department. She also taught book classes at the School of Visual Arts, in both the BFA and MPS Digital Photo Departments.
A New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Photography Fellow, her photographs have been nominated for the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography and the Santa Fe Prize. Her photographs and artist books are in various public and private collections and have been exhibited internationally. Other professional experiences include artist-in-residence, book reviewer, curator, photo archivist, and tarot card reader.
Ellen’s photo-based artworks are collages based on art-historical sources and her family photo archives. Since 2020 she has been creating daily cyanotypes on cloth using bequeathed family objects, cemetery rubbings, animal totems, and plastic cubes and tubes.
Born in 1952 in New York City, she now lives and works in Sherman, Connecticut. She exhibits work at the Carter Burden Gallery, in NYC.
Artist statement
I am a photographer, collage-maker, and book artist, interested in family archives and objects bequeathed to me, which I use in my current artworks.
I make art as pleasure, as practice, as meditation, and as homage; to my sanity and my delight. Because I must, because I have to: to teach from, to learn from, to look at, to remember. I tend to work on long-term projects that mesh into the fabric of my life. I work in spurts and starts, in different mediums.
I studied art history in college and photography in graduate school, and taught art, photography, photo history, and book arts for forty-plus years: I retired from teaching in 2022.
My interest in photography goes back to my childhood and the trove of images in which I noticed family resemblances, especially of myself to the childhood photographs of my paternal grandmother. These images and the notions of keepsake, memory, and resemblance have continued to fascinate me throughout my life.
For me, art is about the power of preparation and perseverance, of working at something over one’s lifetime, with room for change and variation. To hopefully create something more important than oneself, worthwhile enough to share with others.
