Guest Artist in Residence to Speak Feb. 17

South Carolina-born painter Anna Schachte, who interprets and reinvents notions of landscape painting as a way of visiting historical sites in both painting and social histories, will be the guest artist in residence at Illinois State from Feb. 9 to March 6.  She will present a guest lecture at noon Tuesday, Feb. 17, in the University Galleries. 

Admission is free and open to the public.  The School of Art Visiting Artist Program has brought her to campus.

Schachte states that, as a contemporary artist who paints, she is a tourist.  She hopes to visit the past, collecting souvenirs to make something new.  In a recent body of work, "The Future is Here," she takes the premise of an imagined "Great American Road Trip" into the future to improvise on the iconography of the American landscape.  This allowed her to imagine a story of painting's future and include herself in it.

Schachte is currently working on a new group of paintings on the theme of "Time Travel & Leisure."   Picturing global vacation destinations of the near future and recent past, she is discovering new and hybridized forms in her painting. 

Schachte, who moved to New York in 1998 after receiving a bachelor of fine arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design, received her MFA degree six years later from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She had her first solo show at Taxter & Spengemann in New York City. 

Her work has been included in group exhibitions in New York, Detroit, San Francisco and Chicago, as well as the traveling exhibition "Poets on Painters."   Residencies and awards include The Seven Below Arts Initiative in Burlington, Vermont; Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Fla.; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation in Chicago.