Biography

Born and raised in southwestern North Dakota, Marlene Alt is an artist who is interested in the psychological landscape, in juxtaposing historical perspectives on the American landscape with visceral, lived experiences in the landscape. Her work in sculpture and installation focuses on landscape as place, as body, as memory, and as object. Her work seeks to distill the essence of landscape, moving beyond representation toward an interface of nature and culture.

Marlene Alt's work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in museums, university art galleries, and non-profit spaces, such as the San Jose Museum of Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Yellowstone Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, Northern Arizona University Museum, the Ohio University Art Gallery, A+D Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI. She has been the recipient of an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. She has also received invitations to make new work and to give lectures about her work, as an artist-in-residence and as a visiting artist, in national and international venues, such as Sculpture Space, Utica, NY, the University of Texas, San Antonio, the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and the Bubec Sculpture Studio, Prague, Czech Republic.

Marlene received her BFA degree from Moorhead State University, Moorhead, Minnesota. Her last term at MSU was spent in an internship working with the sculptor, Alice Aycock, in NYC. She then went on to complete her MFA at the University of California, San Diego. Marlene currently lives and works in Ashland, Oregon, where she also teaches Sculpture and Installation as a professor at Southern Oregon University.