ABOUT

“As a biologist and longtime resident of Louisiana, Stewart witnesses our fraught relationship with nature on micro and macrocosmic levels – as we awaken to the peril currently at the heart of our relationship with our biosphere. Stewart’s art isn’t the calm before the storm - it is the eye,” Peter Frank (critic, Los Angeles)

Trained as a biologist, Allison Stewart’s forty-year visual arts career has been informed by our increasingly fragile environments and the ultimate interconnectedness of all living things. Using deep layers of color and texture to illustrate experiences of time and transformation, Stewart navigates the complex and often disturbing relationships between humans and nature. Activated in the liminal space between realism and abstraction, Stewart’s paintings are visual diaries upon which her responses to our threatened landscape are illuminated.

Stewart has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and is represented by the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans, Gail Severn Gallery in Sun Valley, and Michael Warren Contemporary in Denver. Her work is included in many public, corporate and private collections, including the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Historic New Orleans Collection, Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Ann Korologos Gallery, Basalt CO.. Awards include fellowships and grants from the Louisiana Division of the Arts, the Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mary Freeman Wisdom Foundation, and artist-in-residence with Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado.

In 1998, Stewart and her husband, artist Campbell Hutchinson, founded KID smART, a Louisiana non-profit arts organization that brings the visual and performing arts as teaching tools to under-resourced children in the public schools of New Orleans. KID smART’s focus is arts integration – linking the arts with the existing academic curriculum to make learning come alive. Today KID smART programs are found in thirteen New Orleans elementary and middle schools in and have reached more than 80,000 students.  KID smART.org

Stewart holds a BS in Biology from Spring Hill College, and an MFA from the University of New Orleans. She maintains studios in New Orleans and Snowmass Village, CO.

“Nature in Stewart’s imagination is mythic, incantatory, an effervescent field of energy. Poised between the accidental and constructed, Stewart’s profound fluidity emphasizes the impermanence of all things, her work residing in the place where all appears in and as flux,” Dominique Nahas (critic, New York)

“Stewart’s painting inhere so much of their sources’ natural vitality that they are charged with an energy that bridges the real and painted. There is finally no distinction between those two states – a condition many organic abstractionists seek but only a few achieve as regularly, and as deftly,” Peter Frank