Ann Tarantino
State College, Pennsylvania
Ann Tarantino is an artist working in drawing, painting, collage, murals, and public art. Her work explores the intersections of natural and manmade landscapes.
Message
Ann Tarantino is an artist investigating the relationship of the natural world to the built environment. Through drawing, painting, installation and site-specific public art, she engages viewers in a dialogue around the relationship of landscapes to time, space, culture, and movement. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, with public art installations appearing in various settings including museums and galleries, botanical gardens, and city streets. A New England native, Tarantino spent her formative years near the ocean – a constant that continues to inform her experiences of the landscape and the form of her work. Movement through time and space have been ongoing fascinations as she has traveled back and forth between continents, living and working variously in Japan, Brazil, Italy, and the United States, each landscape leaving a distinct imprint on her work.
Recent exhibitions and projects include major public commissions for the cities of Ogden, UT and Columbia, SC; a public-scale painting commissioned by the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority’s DotART program and the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership; and, forthcoming, a solo exhibition at the Juniata College Museum of Art (Huntingdon, PA) and major public commission for the University of Nebraska (Lincoln, NE) in 2025.
Tarantino was a 2016-17 recipient of a Fulbright Core Scholar Award for artistic practice in Brazil. She earned an honors degree in Visual Arts from Brown University and her Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Painting from The Pennsylvania State University. She lives and works in Central Pennsylvania.
Statement
I make paintings, works on paper, and public art projects charting experiences of place, time, and space. My work combines digital and analog tools and ranges in scale from handheld drawings to public-scale paintings in urban contexts. Across media, delicate lines, bursts of color, and shadow-like forms layer and combine to describe the complexity of moving through a modern world.
I begin most works with a ground of intricate lines created by etching their surfaces with networks of lines. Originally, the line drawings resulted from digital tracings of my abstract landscape drawings; more recently, they include references to woven textiles, plant forms, natural forces like wind and water, or the movement of people across time and space, through migration or travel. Later, I layer on swaths of airbrushed color, geometric forms, and stenciled patterns, all drawn from observations of the natural world and built environment. When designing a public project or permanent installation, I work in much the same way: layering lines with color and form in multi-layered compositions that hover between transparent and opaque. Public works, printed on glass or affixed to windows, locate viewers directly within this shifting landscape.
My work emerges from the history of landscape painting, traveling with it into an expanded field and worrying the boundaries between digital and hand. Its multiple layers and shifting perspectives spark an expansion of worldview, inviting viewers to consider their place within the past, present, and future of the landscape and heightening one’s sense of orientation, impact, and connection.