Ellen Lesperance

Ellen Lesperance is an American artist and educator renowned for her gouache paintings. Her works often feature intricate patterns inspired by the full-body garments worn by female activists.

Biography of Ellen Lesperance

Ellen Lesperance was born in Minneapolis in 1971. Raised in Seattle in a large, mixed-race family with adopted siblings, she attributes her deep understanding of inequity and the struggle for justice to these formative experiences. 

She received her BRA from the University of Washington in Seattle (1995) and her MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick (1999). She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1999).

Lesperance has received several awards, grants and accolades, including:

• Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Grant (1999);
• Faculty Development Grant from Maine College of Art (2001);
• LEF Foundation Grant, New England Division (2005);
• Betty Bowen Award (2010);
• Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014);
• Chiaro Award, Headlands Center for the Arts (2017);
• Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2018);
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fine Arts (2020).

Her recent solo exhibitions include "Stay in the Centre of No-Man's Land" at Hollybush Gardens in London (2024), "The Land Of Feminye" at Derek Eller Gallery in New York (2022), "Amazonknights" at ICA Miami in Miami (2021), "Velvet Fist" at Baltimore Museum of Art (2020), and many more.

Currently, the artist lives and works in Portland, US.

Ellen Lesperance's Famous Paintings

Lesperance's gouache paintings often feature intricate patterns inspired by the full-body garments worn by female activists.

Notable works include "Oui Girls, Look!" (2017), "The Vigil" (2019), "Greenham Women Are Everywhere" (2019), "XOXOXOX" (2019), "Wishbone, Heart, House" (2022), "Study for an Anarchist Sweater" (2023), "The Anarchist, Four Minutes to Midnight" (2023), among others.

Ellen Lesperance's Art Style

The artist uses knitting patterns as a visual language to pay tribute to female activism. Drawing inspiration from influential protests of the twentieth century, such as the Greenham Common Peace Camp, she begins by sourcing archival images of protesters’ hand-knitted garments. These images are first translated into American Symbolcraft before being rendered into detailed gouache paintings on paper.

Influenced by Bauhaus-era female weavers, the Pattern and Decoration movement, and feminist art from the 1970s and 1980s that focused on the female body, Lesperance recontextualizes image-making outside of traditional male-dominated Western painting traditions. Her work celebrates the creative labor of women who have challenged social, political, and environmental injustices.