Ellen Driscoll

Her work encompasses drawing, sculpture and public art.

Some of her early sculptures, such as The Loophole of Retreat at the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris (1991) and Passionate Attitudes at Threadwaxing Space, New York (1995), were primarily mixed media and found objects.

During her residency at the MacDowell Colony in 2007, Ellen Driscoll made a commitment to work solely with re-purposed and found materials. She was working at the time in collaboration with Golnar Adili and Aimee Burg, on an installation at Wave Hill for "Thoreau Reconsidered". The art connected the ideas of the philosophers' self-reliance, egalitarianism, and respect, with the collection, cleaning, and fabricating of sculpture with materials removed from the waste stream.[5]

She started to retrieve plastic bottles directly from the streets to create artwork such as Phantom Limb, FastForwardFossil Part 2, and Still Life.[4]

Her current work are labor intensive sculptural landscapes criticizing the oil industry and over consumption. She is a member of the collective Project Vortex,[6] which aims to educate the general public about the impact of plastics and plastic pollution.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Sculpture Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, a Sculpture Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1985, and the Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 1987. She was recently awarded the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Educator Award. [7][8]

She has had numerous solo exhibitions, among them, Fastforwardfossil Part 2 at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY in 2009,[9] Fastforwardfossil part 3 at the West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen in Ireland in 2010, and “Venti Trasversali (Crosswinds)” at the Museo di Storia Naturale dell’ Accademia dei Fisiocritici in Siena, Italy, in 2016.

The Loophole of Retreat was commissioned in 1991 for the Whitney Museum at Phillip Morris. [10]

Her first major public art commission from the MTA's Percent for Art program is As Above, So Below at the Grand Central Terminal in New York City (1999). [11][12] The glass, bronze, and mosaic work is an homage to the famous ceiling of Grand Central Terminal's main concourse, and depicts the night sky over 5 continents. Tales and myths from different civilizations about the origin of the world, and the movements of the stars and heavens, are depicting within each representation of the continents. As Above, So Below is a reminder that ancient stories about the stars, can in fact mirror our earthly daily routines.

Her work is in the following museum and public collections:

• Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy. Andover, MA
• Bayly Art Museum Of The University Of Virginia. Charlottesville, VA
• Boston Public Library. Boston, MA
• Detroit Institute of Arts. Detroit, MI
• Harvard Art Museums. Cambridge, MA[13]
• Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cambridge, MA
• Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Wellington, New Zealand[14]
• Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. Waltham, Massachusetts. USA
• Smith College Museum Of Art. Northampton, MA[15][16]
• The New School for Social Research. New York, NY
• University of Michigan Museum of Art. Ann Arbor, MI[17]
• Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, NY
• Whitney Museum of Art. New York, NY[18]

• National Endowment for the Arts (1984)
• New York Foundation for the Arts (1985)
• Guggenheim Foundation (1987)
• Massachusetts Cultural Council, Sculpture Fellowship
• Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio, Italy, Residency (2001)
• LEF Foundation grant for FastForwardFossil
• Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, Fellowship (1988-1989)
• MacDowell Colony Residency (2008)
• Sirius Art Centre Residency, Cork, Ireland (2009)
• 2014 Fine Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• Siena Arts Institute Fellowship (2015)
• New England Foundation for the Arts grant for Filament/Firmament
• International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Educator Award (2018) [19]