Liz Whitney Quisgard

Biography

Originally from Baltimore, Liz Whitney Quisgard lives and works in New York City. Quisgard graduated from the Maryland Institute’s College of Art, earned her MFA at the Maryland Institute Rinehart School of Sculpture, and attended the Maryland Institute School of Architectural Design and Drafting (MICA). She has taught at MICA, Goucher College, and the University of Maryland. 

Among her numerous grants and awards is the prestigious Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant. She has been chosen for residencies at the Millay Colony and the Yaddo Colony, among others.

Liz Whitney Quisgard has had solo exhibitions of her work at numerous museums and galleries including the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN; the Museum of Geometric and MADI Art, Dallas TX; the Phillips Art Museum, Franklin Marshall College, Lancaster, PA; Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY; the Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, MA; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City Hall Gallery, Charleston, SC; the Gilchrist Museum, Cumberland, MD; the Shakolsky Foundation, Jim Thorp, PA; the Loveland Museum, Loveland, CO; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; the Visual Arts Association, Louisville, KY; the Gibson Gallery, Art Museum of the State University of New York at Potsdam; the Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN; the Union Theological Seminary, New York, NY, and many more. Her work is included in the permanent collections of 47 museums, as well as corporate and private collections across the United States.

Artist statement

In my youthful, “truth-seeking” days, I wrote reams of justification for my work. Now that the work has matured, and I, simultaneously, put less and less value on truth, words have become irrelevant. So, when called upon to explain what I do, I am inclined to say – “What you see is what you get.”

Crouched in this flippant response is a firm conviction that the visual arts are exactly that – visual. No meanings. No preachments. No symbols. Politics; philosophy; the human condition; the environment and other causes about which people paint, perform and sculpt these days are subjects for discourse – best expressed with words. Attempts to transform them into pictorial images tend to become mere illustrations – most often jejune.

My goal is to surprise and engage the mind by seducing the eye. Toward that end, I rely on a pattern. The term “decorative” has been applied to my work – most often in a negative sense. But, that’s okay with me, for some of the most important art is essentially decorative, Islamic rugs; Greek column capitals; Navajo textiles; Byzantine mosaics; baroque architectural embellishments...and so forth.

We all understand a row of triangles, a strip of squares, an arrangement of circles, and swirls. No need to ask their meaning. They simply are what they are. They speak to us universally and without apology.