GRAM & Ox-Bow Summer Lecture Series: Mari Eastman and Lisa Williamson

Mari Eastman’s work emerges from a pictorial study of images from magazines and the internet which become intertwined with personal narratives, executed in an intentionally loose manner. Eastman holds an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited at Bombon Projects (Barcelona), Broadway Gallery(New York), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Orange County Museum of Art, the Berkeley Museum of Art, Cherry and Martin Gallery (Los Angeles), Spruth and Magers (Munich), Barbara Gladstone Gallery (New York), and Maureen Paley (London) among other venues.

Her work has been included in such publications as Modern Painters, The New York Times, and on the websites Artforum.com and Contemporary Art Daily. Eastman lives and works in Chicago and is on the faculty at The University of Chicago.

Lisa Williamson creates works that are visually precise, physically resonant, and highly attuned to the spaces in which they are exhibited. Regarding precision as an expressive gesture and calibration as a mode of production, the artist’s expansive approach to color and meticulous attention to surface softens the line between abstraction and figuration, painting and sculpture, language and object. Born in 1977, Williamson lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She graduated with a MFA from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (2008) and received her BFA from Arizona State University, Tempe (1999).

Her most recent solo exhibitions include Hover Land Lover at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, LA (2024) and A Landscape and A Hum, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY (2022). Williamson’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; CCA Andratx, Mallorca; University of Illinois, Springfield; and The Embassy of the United States in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.