Amy Vogel

Amy Vogel (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices (CP). She joined what was then called the First Year Program in 2008. Amy played a key role evolving the First Year Program into the Department of Contemporary Practices, and was Co-Chair of the Department between 2008–2012. Amy served as Interim Director from 2015–2017 and 2018–2019, and Director from 2019–2020. She received her MFA from California College of Arts, Oakland, CA in 1995, and her BFA and Art Education Certification from The University of Colorado, Boulder, 1990.

As an artist, Vogel has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Prats Nogueras Blanchard, Madrid, Spain; Larissa Goldston (NY), Paul Kotula (Detroit), Edward Mitterrand (Geneva), and Air de Paris (Paris). In 2014 she had a survey of 15 years' work, entitled Amy Vogel: A Paraperspective, at the Cleve Carney Gallery at the College of DuPage. She has participated in group shows at Western Exhibitions (Chicago), White Columns (NY), The Suburban (Oak Park), FRAC Haute-Normandie (Sotteville-lès-Roue), Francesca Pia (Zürich), and other venues. Vogel has collaborated with artist and Professor Joseph Grigely on many projects, including shows at the Orange County Museum of Art; the MCA, Chicago; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; the Berlin Biennial; the Yokohama Triennial; Mathildenhöfe, Darmstadt; the French Academy in Rome, and other international venues. She has had reviews in national and international periodicals, including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and Artforum.

Working across drawing, painting, and sculpture, Vogel investigates our fragile and shifting relationship with the physical world. Her pencil drawings depict natural and constructed landscapes inhabited by figures who seem absorbed in their own worlds, occupying their surroundings yet rarely engaging with them. Whether waiting, escaping, or simply resting, these figures evoke a quiet ambiguity. Her drawings are at once detailed and dissolving, as erasure and mark-making interrupt and reshape the image. Her sculptures combine everyday objects with taxidermized animals, particularly seagulls, which sit on items such as fabricated rocks, toys, planters or an overturned chair, with brightly colored paint decorating or destroying both. With the sculptures it is our bodies that inhabit a world that is both mundane and askew.