Faculty Spotlight Series: Amie Cunat Drawings
The Department of Visual Arts at Fordham University is pleased to present a new summer installment of the Faculty Spotlight Series with Amie Cunat. This selection of drawings shares Cunat’s explorations, which have informed her recent work on canvas, and offer a play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien.
Amie Cunat Drawings is the second publication for Hayden’s Books, a series honoring Hayden Hartnett, a much-loved visual art major. Hayden’s Books focuses on presenting artist projects, research, critical writings, and works in progress.
The Fordham University Galleries are currently closed to the public in response to COVID-19. In the meantime, please visit our gallery website frequently, as our gallery will continue to feature a robust selection of offerings from the different areas of study in the Department of Visual Arts: Architecture, Film/Video, Graphic Design, Painting, and Photography. Stay tuned for more online presentations, discussions, and public dialogues coming this fall as our gallery website functions as a launching platform for a thoughtful engagement with the issues of our times.
Artist Statement:
In 2018, Amie Cunat began to explore plant-like imagery within her abstract paintings. Influenced by depictions of nature from Shaker gift drawings, Art Deco, science fiction, and horror movies, Cunat’s work appears loud and flamboyant at first read. Whether they are painted from an observed source or the artist’s memory, their exclamatory presence is supplanted and prolonged through charged hue and inventive form. They offer a play between the horrific and goofy, the earthy and transcendent, the familiar and alien. The selection of drawings shares her explorations, which have informed her recent work on canvas.
Artist Bio:
Amie Cunat (b. 1986, McHenry, IL) is a Japanese American artist, who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Cunat received her MFA from Cornell University, Post-Baccalaureate in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Fordham University. She has had solo exhibitions at Peep (PA), Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, Victori +Mo, Knockdown Center, Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill, Outside (MA), The Cooper Union, among others. Recent group exhibitions include Fur Cup at Underdonk (Brooklyn), The Unusual Suspects at DC Moore Gallery (NY), Surreality at Crush Curatorial (NY), The Unlikely Whole at ArtYard (NJ) and Softer but Louder at Geary Contemporary (NY). In 2019, she was awarded a Regional Economic Development Council Grant by NYSCA in collaboration with Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon. Her work has been reviewed and featured by The New York Times, ARTnews, Artsy, Artnet News, Vogue Italia, ArtMaze Mag, and Two Coats of Paint.