Andrea Sulzer, whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, has been named Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence at Hollins University for 2023.
Each year, Hollins’ artist-in-residence program brings to campus a nationally recognized artist who produces work and teaches a special seminar. The program honors Niederer, a beloved art historian who taught for many years at Hollins.
Sulzer draws, prints, paints, and mixes these disciplines in an intuitive and free-associative process. Her daily practice reflects a constant pull between building a foundation and dismantling it, always trying to get closer to the underlying impulse for making things.
Her work often lives on the edge between object and image, statement and question, figure and abstraction. She is interested in landscape as both setting and character, and as an archive of human experience. In much of her work, forms shift, dissolve, and reorganize themselves like the fluid and unstable nature of memory. How a singular solution is shaken out of limitless possibilities and the role that chance plays in keeping this process open is also an abiding interest. At the heart of her practice is the deep belief in the need for wonder and discovery.
Sulzer’s multidisciplinary background includes a Bachelor of Arts in French from New York University and a Master of Arts from Columbia University’s Teachers College. She then completed a Master of Science in forest biology at the University of Maine and became a laboratory instructor at Bowdoin College. Fusing her interest in the natural sciences and art, she illustrated a number of books in marine and conservation biology. In 1998, she left Bowdoin College to pursue her art practice.
In 2004 Sulzer received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission, and has held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Ucross Foundation, and Surf Point Residency, among others.
Sulzer has exhibited in New York, Colorado, Maine, London, Glasgow, and Munich, and has had solo museum exhibitions at the Portland Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, and University of Maine Museum of Art. She also has recently completed a number of large-scale public art projects for Maine schools through the Maine Percent for Art program.
Her work is included in numerous collections: Portland Museum of Art, Bates College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Colby College Museum of Art, The University of Maine Museum of Art, Fidelity Corporation, Syzygy, and numerous private collections in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany.
Sulzer lives in Maine and teaches part-time at the University of Southern Maine.
