Amy Sacksteder's work explores personal and collective relationships to landscape and artifact. She works across media, most commonly in painting, collage, drawing, cut paper, ceramics, and stained glass. Her work has been included in exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent solo and two-person venues include James May Gallery (Milwaukee, WI); University of Mississippi (Oxford, MS); Ann Arbor Art Center (MI) and University of Michigan Institute for Humanities (Ann Arbor, MI). Recent group venues include Tyger Tyger Gallery (Asheville, NC); Tiger Strikes Asteroid—Greenville (SC); and Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY). She has forthcoming 2025 and 2026 solo exhibitions at Ox-Bow House (Douglas, MI) and River House Arts (Toledo, OH). Sacksteder has completed artist residencies at SÍM (Reykjavík, Iceland); Takt (Berlin, Germany); The Hungarian Multicultural Center (Budapest, Hungry); and the Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL); among others. Her work has been featured and reviewed in journals such as The Offing, Flint Magazine, New American Paintings and the Chicago Tribune and has been included in the curated registries of The Drawing Center, White Columns, and the Flat File 2022 Program at Ortega y Gasset Projects, where she is also highlighted as a 2022 and 2024 Artist to Watch. She presently has work included in the Flat File Index at Real Tinsel in Milwaukee. Sacksteder and her family live in Ypsilanti, Michigan, outside of Detroit. Sacksteder works from her studios in Ypsilanti and Long Island City, and is a professor in the School of Art & Design at Eastern Michigan University.

My work explores artifacts as vehicles of human connectedness to specific sites and occurrences. Compelled by interactions with the land and landscape, I investigate the personal, environmental, and political significances of place. My maternal roots are in the North Georgia mountains, where my extended family were subsistence farmers, living closely with the land, three generations packed into a tin-roofed cabin. Through the upheaval of many relocations during my own childhood, revisiting the family land—equal parts mica-flecked red clay riverbanks and buckshot cars rusting in the woods—has been a constant. These artifacts and images integrate into my working palette. In the studio, their context is altered—they’re transmuted. Repetition creates an echoing dialog among paintings, works on paper, stained glass, and ceramic work; between the depicted and the displayed. Drawing upon inherited instincts—both familial and formal—I splice objects and imagery from natural and constructed environments (foam packing forms, safety-orange fences), with particular repeated elements (paver/stone shapes, scribbled lines), and glowing color. The resulting work spans disciplines—pivoting between realism and abstraction, the depicted and the embodied—contradictions palpable.

Exhibition:

Dream Machine