Bio

Give me a mess and I’ll make it make sense or better yet I'll make the mess myself and work at it, until it feels calm. My art is how I organize and understand my world visually and emotionally. I do this through practice, through repetition, through visiting and revisiting and sometimes through trudging through, until I get it just right.

My practice has always existed within some bounds that I set. I like to work with what I have and see where it takes me. Since I am always creating I never really know what’ll stick, what will be the thing that is strong enough to carry what I need it to. My art serves as a kind of biography of time and place that is specific to me but responsive to all that is happening in my life. Plop me down anywhere, anyplace and I will start to make work to help figure it out all out.

Abbie Wanamaker is an artist, illustrator, writer and educator living in Western MA with her husband and daughter. She studied painting at UMass Amherst and went on to get her MFA at the University of Southern California, before deciding to go back to school to work with children. In her artwork she works with color, form and design, interpreting and responding to the world around her through drawings, painting, poetry, stories and photography. Abbie has shown her work at galleries and public spaces in Los Angeles, Boston, Provincetown & Amherst, MA. She has two self-published children’s books and during her time in Boston, she worked to bring art making, into public spaces, through her work with community organizations, in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.