Ellen Lesperance


Ellen Lesperance is an American artist who frequently relies upon the visual vernacular of knitting to describe a female subject divorced from mainly male, Western figure painting traditions. Her works are typically gouache paintings that pattern the full-body garments of female activists engaged in Direct Action protests. She is based in Portland, Oregon.

Early life and education

Lesperance was born in Minneapolis and raised in Seattle. She attended Roosevelt High School, University of Washington School of Art, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Career and work

Ellen Lesperance employs various art mediums, but she often relies upon the visual language of knitting patterning. In a 2017 article for Frieze magazine, Jen Kabat writes that Lesperance's work "transmits messages about history, feminism and labour through the art of knitting." Citing inspiration from years of working as a pattern knitter for Vogue Knitting magazine, Bauhaus-era female weavers, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, and body-based feminist artists of the 1970s and 1980s, Lesperance's gouache paintings on paper can be followed as patterns to recreate historic knit garments. She sources these historic garments from archival images and film footage of women involved in Direct Action protest, including women from: the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, Earth First!, Occupy events, feminist-era protest events, and the feminist art canon. Through studying activists' visual strategies, Lesperance "recognized that Creative Direct Action provides a powerful model for politically-inclined artists... but unfortunately it is creative making that exists outside the purview of contemporary art." In a 2018 review for Artforum, Claire Lehmann describes the paintings as "reanimations of agitators' attire."
She has also taught at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, the Maine College of Art, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Pollack Krasner Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Ford Family Foundation, and Grants and Awards from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Art Matters, and the Puffin Foundation. She is the author of Peace Camps and Velvet Fist
Lesperance is also the organizer of the sweater rental project Congratulations & Celebration, in which a recreation of a Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp jumper is mailed around the world to motivate acts of courage.

Exhibitions

Selected exhibitions include the following.