Artist Statement
Anna Chapman is an artist, an art educator, and a community arts facilitator. These three modes of practice directly inform each other, yielding a sustainable and holistic approach that allows her to flow between intuitive expression, community+environmental connection, and creative guidance. She is passionate about continuously exploring transformative approaches to art making, community cohesion, and connection to land, in light of destabilized socio-ecological contexts.
Anna’s practice is historically rooted in painting and drawing. More recently, she is branching out into fibers. She works on a large scale, invoking a ritualistic process of dedication, care, and endurance toward something larger than herself. Through the act of making, she seeks a remembrance of entanglement and responsibility to the world around her.
In January 2024, Anna initiated a community loom project. Inspired by her mother’s weaving studio, she invites the public to engage in the historic and transcultural acts of knotting, wrapping, and weaving to build towards a physical and metaphoric language of repair and collective care.
Anna’s practice is deeply informed by contemporary post-colonial, queer, eco-feminist, and indigenous theorists. Important thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kim Tallbear, Eve Tuck, Claire Bishop, and Jack Halberstam illuminate ways of knowing and being that activate our potential to be agents of change, moving toward reconciliation and interconnection in a culture that often feels out of right relation with each other and the living world.
Anna received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012 and a Master of Arts in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. She is currently wrapping up a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As of 2025, she is actively creating and showing work in Western Massachusetts, and Cleveland, Ohio. She is also teaching in several different contexts: through the undergraduate art department at Umass Amherst, through the pre-college program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and biannually through ecoartspace, a platform for artists addressing environmental issues. She also occasionally co-facilitates large-scale youth-led murals with Artolution, an international, community-based public art organization.Many of the materials she uses are sourced from the surrounding environment, requiring participation with the land, animals, and people around her. For example, black walnut husks, foraged sticks from trees and vines, as well as locally sourced fibers are processed to make ink, charcoal, and yarn.
