ARTEMIS ANTIPPAS

[lives & works - New Orleans, LA ::: b. 1985 – New Orleans, LA]

ARTEMIS ANTIPPAS was born in 1985 in New Orleans, Louisiana to an abstract painter mother and an art dealer father. Antippas attended American University, where she received her BA in Public Communications and Art History in 2008. She has shown her work in galleries and museums throughout the country including the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts (Grand Rapids, MI), Treat Gallery (New York City), Katzen Arts Center (Washington, DC), and The Dairy Center of the Arts (Boulder, CO). Locally, Antippas has exhibited throughout Louisiana at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Contemporary Arts Center, McNeese State University, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, Barrister’s Gallery, Le Mieux Gallery, and multiple Prospect satellite exhibitions.

Being born in New Orleans and growing up in an art-centric family have both been strong influences in Antippas’ artistic approach and daily practice.

The artist says of her work...

I was raised in the French Quarter of New Orleans, spending my childhood exploring the streets from Frenchmen all the way up to Royal Street to Canal. From a very early age, I became consumed with the awesome wildness that is New Orleans.

The work I make is both a reflection of my intense connection to the city and the various obsessions that preoccupy my mind throughout most days. Obsessing over things like fried chicken and glitter, hoarding my grandmother’s used lipsticks and holey pantyhose, soccer, and all its beauty, making monthly visits to dollar stores to wander up and down the aisles, New Orleanians’ unrelenting tendencies of fête and food…these are a just few of my ever-growing list of mundane but particular things that fascinate and excite me.

My most recent work, a series of nose portraits entitled Us, is an exploration of the physicality of the distinct noses in my family. My Greek nose is what physically and visually ties me to my mom and my yiayia (grandmother) – I wear who I am and where my family comes from on my face. I am proud to carry this nose and to be so easily identified as Greek, and to be so easily identified as the offspring of my mom just by the similarities of our noses. Us, this series of contour profiles of my nose, my mom’s nose, and my grandmother’s nose, fabricated out of neon, take the feature I am sometimes most insecure about in regards to my physical appearance and display it on a wall to be viewed by strangers. Each nose is depicted in a vivid and significant color, specific to the family member to whom it belongs.