Pratt Institute

Personal URL

Education

B.A., Swarthmore College; Art History
Cert. 3, painting, drawing & sculpture
painting

Biography

B.A., Swarthmore College; M.F.A., Queens College; Skowhegan School; NY Studio School. Solo Exhibitions: Gallery Janet Kurnatowski, Greenpoint; Queens College Art Center; Tribes Gallery, NYC; Dartmouth College; Delaware Arts Center Gallery, Narrowsburg, NY. Represented: ChÂ’i Gallery, Williamsburg; Galeria Janet Kurnatowski, Greenpoint; MFI Fine Art, SOHO. Fellowships: VCCA; Cummington Center. Collections: Alliance Capitol Financial; First Albany Corporation; Frederic R. Harris; Kaye Insurance; Moore Capital Management

Provoked to visual explosions by the ancient Indian epic-myth, The Ramayana, Zinnes’s current paintings contain the spirit of the storyteller in the guise of the abstract adventurer. Not illustrations or literal translations, they are instead transformations from poetry to mysterious abstract landscapes of a dream world inhabited by figure, animal and birdlike images. These paintings suggest that the boundaries between underworld and waking earth are traversable, that terror coexists with joy, and that loss must always yield to renewal. In them, the very sky descends to occupy the ground as fog, then rises back to its rightful place; tunnels simultaneously lead downward to a dark center and offer an opening and escape to the bright air above.

For years Zinnes painted the landscape of rural northeastern Pennsylvania, and that landscape space is in her bones and blood. Now, rather than suggesting the light and space of an actual motif, her landscapes are cast deep in the rich colors of myth and poetry-the language and pictures we create to understand the world at its least understandable.

Zinnes has had five solo exhibitions in New York City, including a 25-year retrospective at The Art Center at Queens College (November – December 2002), as well as been included in many group exhibitions. She also has had one-person shows at Dartmouth and Swarthmore Colleges, the Simon Gallery, in Morristown, New Jersey, and the Delaware Valley Arts Center, Narrowsburg, NY. Ms Zinnes has been reviewed (often with illustrations) in The New York Times, New York Newsday, New York Arts Magazine, Art New England, and The Queens Tribune. She has received awards from the National Academy of Design, and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Arts as well as from the Cummington Community for the Arts. Zinnes’s work is in many public and private collections: in New York City it is at Alliance Capitol Financial, the First Albany Corporation, Frederick Harris, Inc., and Kaye Insurance, Inc.; in New Jersey it is at Schein Pharmaceuticals; and in Philadelphia it is in the collection of Wolf Block & Solis-Cohen.

Currently Zinnes teaches at Pratt Institute and New York City Technical College, CUNY. She has given guest lectures and critiques at Dartmouth College, and was a panelist at the National Academy of Design, discussing abstract art in contemporary painting. Born in Norman, Oklahoma, Alice Zinnes then spent her junior high years at the International School in Geneva, Switzerland. She received her BA from Swarthmore College, a Certificate of Merit from the New York Studio School, her MFA from Queens College, CUNY, and attended the Skowhegan School on a full merit scholarship.