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Biography

Her practice began with re-creating classical European paintings with a feminist, anti-ableist interpretation. The work morphed over time to become interdisciplinary and experimental, using painterly logic to create three dimensional structures and installations. Recent exhibitions have created science fiction characters out of mushrooms, depicted land masses as living bodies, and investigated graveyards as sites of shifting time and more-than-human entanglements.

She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including the Drawing Center (New York, NY), the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA), the Children's Museum of Manhattan (New York, NY), the Bronx Museum (Bronx, NY), the Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, WA), the Licini Museum (Ascoli Piceno, Italy), the Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Suyama Space (Seattle, WA), and the Institute for Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art and Design (Portland, ME). Her work has been reviewed in the Italian edition of Flash Art, Artnet, Time Out, Chicago, and the Boston Globe, and is in the collections of the Rene di Rosa Foundation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Hirshhorn Museum. 

She has participated in residency fellowships at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space, and was a participant in the Drawing Center's Open Sessions Program 2014-2016. She was a member artist of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program from 2014-2019.

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Artist Statement

“If there is a post-Anthropocene worth living in, those who live in it will need different stories, with no entity at the center of the stage.”
- Isabel Stengers

Embracing failure and humor as viable strategies, the results of my work often look like crudely-rendered science fiction structures or crafts. I begin by considering specifics of time and place: historical and architectural features of where a piece will be built or it will be exhibited, the current political climate, and the physicality of my own body in relationship to the structure. I then build rapidly and intuitively, piecing together scraps of found material and everyday objects to create structures that incorporate animations, audio clips, paintings and drawings. Even though they appear provisional, each piece is developed over time - built, then dismantled and reused in new configurations to allow the objects' experiential history to become an integral part of the form, structure, and conceptual meaning.

My most recent work is inspired by more-than-human participatory research practices undertaken at a historic cemetery near my studio in Queens, NY. In accordance with this type of research, the cemetery is an ideal site to explore the idea that human life and death are constituted through many nonhuman forces, from the microbes in our guts, to the insects, plants, and fungi that we live symbiotically with, to the gods and spirits that we summon, and which connect us to a larger cosmology and to each other.

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Curriculum Vita

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Education

MFA, Painting, San Francisco Art Institute, 1997
BS, Graphic Design, Florida State University, 1990
Post-Baccalaureate Study, Painting, Printmaking, University of Florida 1994-1995

Awards/Grants/Fellowships

MacDowell Residency Fellowship, Peterborough, NH

Grant in Aid Faculty Research Awards Committee Grant, Tufts University

2022-23

Finalist, Urban Field Station Residency, New York, NY
2019                         
Studio Artist Residency, Art, Artists, and You, Children’s Museum of Manhattan, New York, NY
Mattress Factory Factory Installed Residency, Pittsburgh, PA
Daynard Travel Fellowship, School of the Museum of the Fine Arts at Tufts University
2016-2019
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program, New York, NY
2018
Yaddo Visual Arts Fellowship, Saratoga Springs, NY
2017                           
Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences Exhibition Residency and Purchase Award,Charleston, WV
Grant in Aid Faculty Research Awards Committee Grant, Tufts University
2016
Foundation for Contemporary Art, Emergency Grant Award
2014-2016

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2022-2023

Patte Loper: Laboratory for Other Worlds, Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA
2021
Quiet Country, Platform Gallery Spotlight, https://www.platformgallery.com/may-spotlight-2021
2019-2020       
Laboratory for Other Worlds, the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA
2017
Visit to a Small Planet, Juliette Art Museum, The Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences, Charleston, WV
Sparkly Darkly, Black and White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Liveable Worlds, Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art and Design (curated by Julie Poitras Santos and Sabine Malcolm) (catalog)

2021

Exchange Rates/Bushwick Expo, Installation in collaboration with Frances Disley, Schema Projects (in conjunction with Platform Gallery, Seattle, WA and Paper Gallery,  Manchester, UK), Brooklyn, NY
The Great Poor Farm Experiment VI, The Poor Farm, Manawa, WI (curated by Brad Killiam and Michelle Grabner) 
Testing Ten Artists, Licini Museum, Ascoli Piceno, Italy (curated by Christian Caliandro) La Cura della Sguardo/the Care of the Gaze, project Dolomiti Contemporanee Cortina d'Ampezzo at th PalaentologicalMuseum, Cortina, Italy

Arango, Jorge S., "Art review: Artistic expressions of interconnectedness offer glimmers of hope in trying times," Portland Press Herald, November 5, 2023, https://www.pressherald.com/2023/11/05/art-review-two-portland-shows-explore-symbiotic-relationships-between-artists-and-in-nature/

Extension Faculty, San Francisco Art Institute

Artist Lectures/Presentations/Critiques
University of Urbana Champaign,"Place-Thought, Economy of Means, Science Fiction, and the Public Imagination," graduate program lecture
Brown University, "Science Fiction and Economy of Means" 3D Foundations lecture and workshop
Evergreen College,Place-Thought, Economy of Means, Science Fiction, and the Public Imagination," lecture and workshop
2019       
Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Art Graduate School, Pittsburgh, PA
School of Visual Arts, Second Year MFA Students, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY, NY
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Curated Art Studio tour, Armory Fair, New York, NY
2018       
Brooklyn College MFA Visiting Artist Lecture Series, "Art and Resistance," Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY
Columbia University Senior Thesis, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY, NY
Artists/Designers/Citizens 2018 AICAD Symposium, Conference Presentation, “Interdisciplinary
Practices: new citizenship through multidisciplinary artistic pedagogy”, Chicago, IL
Studio Artist Talk, Pratt Professional Practices, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY, NY
Studio Artist Talk, City College Art Department, Material Studies, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY NY
2017       
Artist Talk, National Gallery of Jordan, Amman, Jordan
Artist Talk and Workshop, "Art, the Experimental Science," Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences, WV
Artist Talk, Painting Department, RISD, Providence, RI
2016
Artist Talk, Florida State University Department of Art Visiting Artist Series, Tallahassee, FL
2014
Artist Talk, Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY
2012
Artist Talk, Westbeth Gallery, New York, NY
2011
Panelist, Connecticut Office of the Arts FY Fellowship Awards
Panelist, Conveyer Arts, Hoboken, NJ
Artist Talk, The New School, New York, NY
Critiques, Award Jury, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
2006
Juror, Alden B. Dow Museum of Art and Technology, Midland, MI
2002
Artist Talk, University of California, Berkeley Extension Program, San Francisco, CA
Artist Talk, Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA
2000
Artist Talk, Columbia Basin College, Pasco, WA
Artist Talk, Carnegie Art Center, Walla Walla, WA
1999  
Artist Talk, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA


Selected Public Collections
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.
Juliette Art Museum, Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences, Charleston, WV
Progressive Collection, Cleveland, OH
Microsoft Collection, Seattle, WA
Rene di Rosa Foundation, Napa, CA
Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA
Swedish Medical Center, Seattle, WA

Public Activism
2019-Present
Member, Extinction Rebellion Arts Collective
2014 -2017             
Member, Artist Studio Affordability Project (ASAP) Activist group working with TakeBackNYC to pass the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, a commercial rent control bill that is before the NYC City Council. Also educates artists about gentrification and fights gentrification in NYC.