Amy Ellingson

A new site-specific stained glass, 2024

Brilliantly illuminating the Cathedral-like space where grain had previously been sifted and sorted, is a monumental stained glass window loosely referencing the room’s former function. Fabricated in collaboration with Franz Meyer of Munich, the magnificent imagery captures both the historical reference of 19th century American landscape painting and the digital language of early 1980s video games.

Much like the images of the Hudson River School painters that captured the American landscape in the mid 1800s, Ellingson unconsciously references their technique of imposing a prominent feature in the foreground to push our view back to the ethereal cloudy sky. Her multi-layered abstractions move us through a non-literal landscape. The palette is playful and modern while inclusive of the First Nations philosophies regarding the four directions and their associations with color. Our orientation on the land is conveyed as South= white, East=yellow, West=Black, North=red and also sky (blue) and earth (green). The sky has been translated into a language markedly Ellingsons’s own, that recalls both the reductive backdrops in first edition Super Mario Brothers. and the cartoonish clouds in the vibrantly gradated skies of the 19th century Japanese woodblock artist Hiroshige. Here, in this remarkable gift of light, Ellingson reminds us to be present.

Amy Ellingson (b. 1964, California, USA) Amy Ellingson is an artist interested in contemporary digital experience and modalities of abstraction. Her work has been exhibited nationally and in Tokyo, Japan, and is held in various public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the US Embassies in Algeria and Tunisia. She is the recipient of the Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and the Artadia Grant to Individual Artists and has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. Ellingson received a B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College and an M.F.A. from CalArts. She was Associate Professor of Art at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2000 to 2011 and has served on the Board of Directors at Root Division, a San Francisco nonprofit arts organization, since 2011. Her public commission, Untitled (Large Variation), is permanently on view at the San Francisco International Airport. She recently installed a large-scale mosaic mural at Sam Houston State University in Conroe, Texas, and is currently working on a commission for a new public work for the San Diego International Airport. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Amy Ellingson has lived and worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2018. She is a contributor to Hyperallergic, covering exhibitions in the Santa Fe region.