My artistic work explores the complex relationship between human beings and nature through installations, prints, and artists’ books. I am interested in interrogating the tradition of landscape photography and the tension between beautiful, picturesque images of nature and the near-constant threat of environmental change. With a specific interest in photography’s historic relationship to representation, these works draw attention to our active role in constructing and idealizing landscape.

 

Using the book form in experimental formats, these artworks reconsider how we read and access information, as well as how we reproduce, represent, and disseminate text and images. Rather than a fixed site or single image, the fragmented columns, pages, and text engage nature as an accumulation of processes, perceptions, and narratives – a dynamic and shifting site open for perpetual interpretation.

 

By referencing the encyclopedic, the 19th-century panorama, and the Romantic painting tradition, these large-scale installations invoke older modes of image-based representation. These works highlight the inaptness of these tropes in an increasingly fast-paced world. 

 

Nicole Pietrantoni’s artwork explores the complex relationship between human beings and nature via installations, artists’ books, and works on paper. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including a Fulbright to Iceland, a Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Grant, an Artist Trust Fellowship, a Larry Sommers Printmaking Fellowship, the Manifest Prize, and a Graves Award for Excellence in Humanities Teaching. Her work has been in over 100 national and international exhibitions.

Nicole received her MFA and MA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa and her BS in Human and Organizational Development and Art History from Vanderbilt University. Nicole is currently the Board President of SGC International, the largest professional organization dedicated to printmaking, book arts, and papermaking in North America.

Nicole is an Associate Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where she teaches printmaking and book arts. She is deeply committed to arts education and has been a visiting artist at colleges around the country to present workshops and speak about her work. Nicole regards both her professional practice and pedagogy as powerful sites for intellectual, artistic, and ethical transformation.