Marilyn Propp
Marilyn Propp
Raised in upstate New York, Marilyn Propp is an artist/educator whose relief prints on handmade paper have been exhibited in museums and commercial and university galleries throughout the US and in Mexico. Recent exhibits include "Pulped Under Pressure" (currently traveling throughout the U.S.); "Into the Deep: Fragments and Reflections," a two-person show at the Kenosha Public Museum, WI; "Distance," at the Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs in NYC; a solo exhibit at Racine Art Museum’s Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, WI; and a solo show "Notes from the Sea," Grove Gallery, Milwaukee.
She attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Brooklyn Museum Art School, Provincetown Workshop, and San Francisco Art Institute’s pre-MFA program, and received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Residencies/Visiting Artist positions include Jentel, Wyoming; Cill Rialaig, Ireland; Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico; and universities in the Midwest and Southeast. Recently she was a Visiting Artist at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
Propp has received numerous grants and awards, including the Racine Art Museum Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Finalist Award and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Her work is in the collections of the DePaul Art Museum; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College; Summer Palace, Saudi Arabia; Amnesty International NYC; Old St. Patrick's Church, Chicago; Hallmark Collection and the AT&T Collection, Kansas City; and private collections throughout the U.S.
She has taught at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago; Loyola University; Columbia College Chicago; and is currently adjunct faculty at Carthage College, and has been a panelist/lecturer throughout the country. Her curatorial project "Materiality and the Layered (eye)" was exhibited at the Evanston Art Center in 2016, and included a panel discussion and a lecture on the history of collage, entitled "Collage as Social, Political, and Personal Expression."
In 1990 she and David Jones founded Anchor Graphics, Chicago. She relocated in 2016 to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she co-founded the Center for Collaborative Research. CCR’s Press on Wheels takes printmaking and papermaking into the community throughout the Midwest region.
My series "Notes from the Sea" reflects the clash/coexistence between the industrial and the natural worlds, where industrial debris, machine parts, and marine life are entangled or morph into one another. Handmade paper and relief prints are my primary media. Fueled by my concerns about environmentally destructive practices, I use the materiality of paper and print to present images of beauty while offering reflections on destruction.
Handmade paper reflects both the undersea world and the way paper itself is made: a watery material in which wet pulp is stirred, formed, and pressed. Pigmented pulp painting creates richly colored images: I contrast the texture and color of the paper with the crispness and layering of the relief prints. Shapes created by printing on translucent paper or on handmade paper are often cut out and collaged. The rounded format refers to phytoplankton, the basis of the marine food chain, and is also a symbol of interdependence and continuity.
