Annette Lawrence’s art transforms raw data into drawings, objects, and installations. The data accounts for and measures everyday life. Her subjects of inquiry range from body cycles to ancestor portraits, music lessons, unsolicited mail, and journal-keeping. She addresses questions of text as image, and the relationship between text and code. Her work is grounded in examining what counts, how it is counted, and who is counting. Her process is one of making and unmaking, looking, and waiting. She recognizes things that go unannounced, remain steady and continuous, are unremarkable on the surface, and develop meaning over time.
Her work has been widely exhibited and is held in museums and private collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Dallas Museum of Art; Rachofsky Collection; Artpace, San Antonio; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; American Airlines; and the art collection of the Dallas Cowboys. She received a 2018 MacDowell Fellowship, the 2015 Moss/Chumley Award from the Meadows Museum, and the 2009 Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work was included in the 1997 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She received a BFA from the Hartford Art School and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Lawrence recently retired from her post as a Professor of Studio Art at the University of North Texas. She will begin a Visiting Faculty position at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont in August 2021.
