FACULTY
Molly Briggs
Visiting Assistant Professor
Foundations
mbriggs@illinois.edu | website | CV
Teaching areas:
Foundations Drawing and Design
Research areas:
Painting, Drawing, Collaborative Printmaking, Color, Landscapes Real and Imagined, Psychological Mechanisms of Displacement and Projection, Slippage between Abstraction and Representation, Asian Traditions of Ink Painting
Molly Briggs is Visiting Assistant Professor of Foundations at the University of Illinois. Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and is held in public and private collections in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Prior to coming to Illinois she taught for six years in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where she received the 2006 Silver Circle Award for Excellence in Teaching, and also taught in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University. In 2007, Molly Briggs and Walter Wilson co-founded Caladium Editions, a fine art print publishing press based in Champaign, Illinois. The press specializes in affordable limited editions by emerging and mid-career contemporary artists from across the United States.
Molly Briggs’s work uses landscape as a means to consider the nature of reality and the ways that desire and expectation shape our perception of the world. One might regard the landscape itself as an analogy to painting, and to consciousness, in that landscape is a locus of human consciousness – that is, a thing we make by looking – a picture, as it were. Color is used to create optical effects such as retinal fatigue, which highlights a sense of unreality about the image yet heightens the illusion of space by creating a sense of optical depth.
Selected Exhibitions
- 2010
- Molly Briggs, Alice Campbell Alumni Center, University of Illlinois at Urbana-Champaign
- 2009
- Molly Briggs: Clearing, Zg Gallery, Chicago
- 2008
- New Views: Nature Captured, DuPont Gallery I, Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, Delaware
- 2007
- Molly Briggs: Projections, Zg Gallery, Chicago
- 2006
- Molly Briggs: Fabula: North Avenue, I-Space Gallery, Chicago
Selected Bibliography
- 2009
- Westin, Monica, “Recommended: Molly Briggs at Zg Gallery”, New City, April 30, 2009
- 2008
- New American Paintings, Featured Artist, Midwest Edition. Curator, Raphaela Platow.
- 2007
- Cassidy, Victor, “Molly Briggs at Zg”, Art in America, September 2007, p. 172
- 2006
- Lawton, Jenny, “Eight Forty-Eight” Three to See segment, Chicago Public Radio, December 14, 2006
- Artner, Alan, “Trees Along North Avenue Become a Spare Landscape, Chicago Tribune, Art: Reviews, November 24, 2006
- New American Paintings, Featured Artist, Midwest Edition
