Current and Upcoming Exhibitions
VSA Emerging Artists Show, The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.
June 20th -July 28th, 2024
Maris Van Vlack (b. 2002) is an interdisciplinary artist from Massachusetts who works primarily with textiles and painting. She received a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with a concentration in Drawing. Maris has exhibited in the USA and Europe, including shows at the U. S. Capitol Building (Washington, DC), NADA New York (New York, NY), the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), and The Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland). Maris is a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s VSA Emerging Artist Award, the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and the RISD Textile Department Award for Innovation in the Textiles Field. Her work has been published by the Boston Globe, Google Arts & Culture, and Warp + Weft Magazine.
Email: marisrvanvlack@gmail.com
Artist Statement
“Landscape, for me, is the memory of history.”
-Anselm Kiefer
Using traditional textile techniques, Maris Van Vlack constructs tactile images that reference topography, geology, and generational memory. Her work is primarily hand-woven, consisting of panels of fabric that are slowly built up thread by thread, trapping memory and history in the sedimentary process. After hand-weaving the base tapestry, she layers the surface with drawn, painted, and stitched marks, and incorporates areas of industrial jacquard weaving and stoll knitting. Each piece is a balance between the materiality of the fibers and the atmosphere created within the deep pictorial space. The landscapes that appear in the work depict architectural spaces from her family’s history, referencing photographs of places where family members lived in Europe that were destroyed during World War II. Her work is a window through which to see layers of time and memory, depicting the space that exists between the past and the present.