Seeking gallery representation.
Bio
Serena Viola Corson (b. 1996) is an American artist, currently working and studying as an MFA candidate and graduate assistant at LSU.
CV
Solo + Two Person Shows
2026 Reimagining the Commons, Glassell Gallery, Baton Rouge LA
2022 Flora and Font, The Mill, San Francisco CA
2021 The Appalachia of Florida: Welcome to Bithlo by the Water, The Plant, Tallahassee FL
Group Exhibitions
2025 AXA Art Prize, New York Academy of Art, New York NY
2024 Oddkin, Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco CA
2023 A Ripple in the Garden, Soft Times Gallery, San Francisco CA
2023 Bay Area Contemporary Art Show, The Dojo, San Francisco CA
2022 Crimson, Soft Times Gallery, San Francisco CA
2022 Pamplemousse, Pamplemousse Gallery, Richmond VA
2022 No Way Out But Through, Berkley Art Center, Berkley CA
2022 Melting, SFWA Gallery, San Francisco CA June
2022 Tides of Change, Drawing Room SF, San Francisco CA
2021 Florida Show, Moisturizer Gallery, Gainesville FL
2021 What Does Community Look Like To You?, Brush Art Gallery, Lowell MA
2020 See Your Neighbor (virtual), 621 Gallery, Tallahassee FL
2020 Artist Relief Exhibition (virtual) Kole Trent Gallery, Cocoa Beach FL
2019 Remote Dialogue, The University of West Georgia, Carrollton GA
2019 From Creation to Creator: E.W.G.’s Second Annual Art Show, Tallahassee FL
2018 Girls Who Draw Girls, 621 Gallery, Tallahassee FL
2017 Faces, Grassroots Coffee Shop & Gallery, Thomasville GA
Grants/Awards
2025 Honorable Mention, AXA Art Prize, New York Academy of Art
2022 Juror's Award, No Way Out But Through, Berkley Art Center
2022 Juror's Award, Melting, San Francisco Women Artists Gallery
2019 FSU Art Department Travel Grant
2019 IDEA Grant Recipient
2019 Susan & Mark Messersmith Art Scholar Award
2019 SIX Research and Creative Grant
2019 People’s Choice Award at Remote Dialogue Exhibition, UWG
Commissions
Illustrator, Focail na mBan: Women’s Words by Manchán Magan (Book, 2024)
Publications/Press
2022 Harvard Alumna, Kristen Ghodsee, with her new Serena Viola Corson painting
https://scholar.harvard.edu/kristenghodsee/blog/amazing-painting-serena-viola-corson
2022 Mystic Moon Mamas and Matisse: What inspires artist Serena Viola Corson
https://48hills.org/2022/08/mystic-moon-mamas-and-matisse-what-inspires-artist-serena-viola-corson/
2022 No Way Out But Through, Curator's Essay,
https://www.berkeleyartcenter.org/no-way-out-but-through
2021 No Islands: Serena Viola Corson documentary by Cluessa, https://vimeo.com/581606271
2020 Finding Your Niche with Serena Corson, https://goodfit.us/blogs/goodfit-artists/finding-your-niche-with-serena-corson
2018 Contemporary Art as Liberation: Serena V.C.K. and the Phyllis Straus Art Gallery, https://www.hercampus.com/school/fsu/contemporary-art-liberation-serena-vck-and-phyllis-straus-art-gallery? fbclid=IwAR1C95Dh927XQtehwc-8Gmd7oHW7S9eKU6uuDdad1KOASDe R4FsyWvSihEc
Artist Statement
In these times of loneliness and isolation, I paint moments of collective joy that nourish my soul and make life worth living. My practice emerges from an animist worldview, one that perceives all forms of life as interconnected and emerging from the same origin. I’m drawn to Donna Haraway’s definition of oddkin, which calls for solidarity across species and creating alternative, queered family structures. This idea of kinship expands beyond the human, inviting plants, animals, and ecosystems into a shared field of intimacy and reciprocity.
Pulling from both memory and fantasy, I paint myself and friends lying around in the sun, enjoying time off work, surrounded by flora and fauna. My work is in dialogue with historical depictions of leisure by Cézanne, Seurat, and Pissarro, yet it resists the male gaze embedded in those works. I continue the tradition of nude figurative painting through an ecofeminist lens, reclaiming the body not as an object to be dominated, but as a living node within an interdependent web of beings. I see image-making as an act of listening and alchemizing, a way of reimagining our relationship to a breathing planet. This perspective aligns with ecofeminist philosophies that critique extractive hierarchies and instead emphasize care, reciprocity, and regeneration. My practice is animated by love and disciplined hope for a better world.
Formally, my work draws upon Expressionism’s focus on immediacy, subjective experience, and the emotional or spiritual. Like early Expressionists reacting to industrial modernity, I turn away from attempts to replicate reality and toward intuitive mark-making and storytelling. The Western canon’s emphasis on accurate mimesis, emerging from Renaissance perspective and Enlightenment empiricism, reflected a broader cultural shift toward rationality, control, and individualism. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, traces how early capitalist modernity displaced communal and magical worldviews with rationalized, mechanistic ones, a process mirrored in the visual arts’ turn toward realistic depiction. I am interested in reviving what was lost and painting in a free, intuitive, and gestural way that mirrors the liberatory themes within my work. My brushwork becomes an assertion of freedom, resisting control in favor of openness and endless possibility. In this sense, both the content and style of my paintings work together to imagine alternative ways of being: playful, embodied, and interconnected.
