Olivia Petrides

Olivia Petrides has spent more than three decades teaching drawing and painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is an Associate Adjunct Professor. Her path to art wasn’t straight: raised in a science-driven household by a wildlife ecologist father and a mother with a riotously colorful garden, she grew up in national parks and wild backyards. Art came later during a semester in Germany, and only after she had ignored the advice that it was “too late” to become an artist. Influenced as much by William Kentridge and Mark Bradford as by the irreverence of the Chicago Imagists, Petrides insists on keeping both nature and politics present in her work. She has traveled from Africa to Iceland, Greenland to Alaska, always chasing fragile landscapes (she also keeps bees in her Chicago garden). Her practice, equal parts ecological and political, is animated by the urgency to resist numbness in the face of disinformation, and to register, in raw material form, the crises that define our age. Photos below by Brian Griffin.