Ann Craven

American painter Ann Craven is known for her lush portraits of the moon, birds, and flowers, and her bold painted bands of color which reflect on the notion of passing time. Much of Craven’s practice revolves around painting en plein air and the artist’s use of serial motifs belies her interest in ephemeral moments, seasonal cycles, and the changeable qualities of painting. Craven has been making paintings of birds since the late 1990s, inspired by color-plates found in her Italian grandmother’s vintage ornithology books. Like the artist's paintings of the moon, the birds serve as a touchstone for memory, each repetition of the image a revisiting of a moment, a recalling of loved ones. Painting in a sumptuous palette, Craven captures subjective personal experience. Each of Craven’s paintings is inscribed with the date and time of its making, rendering it a unique and isolated index of her process.

Craven received her MFA from Columbia in 1993 and presented her first retrospective TIME at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Moons and Angels at Karma, New York (2021); Ann Craven: Bird We Know at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, (2019); and Ann Craven: Promise (Birds for Chicago) at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2019). Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Portland Museum of Art; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, among others.