info

bio (current, third person)
Avery Lawrence (he/him) lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was born and raised in Charlottesville, VA. He has a BA in Visual Studies from The University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in Art from The California Institute of the Arts. Until recently, he managed artist projects at The Fabric Workshop and Museum and taught studio courses at the University of Pennsylvania. Less recently, he worked at a frame shop, drove a pedicab, installed wedding tents, taught afterschool puppet classes, and participated in a number of paid research studies.

He has shown his video, performance, and installation work at the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), Weatherspoon Museum of Art (North Carolina), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville (Florida), The Orlando Museum of Art (Florida), the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans (Louisiana), The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (Louisiana), The Peeler Art Center (Indiana), and various galleries, art fairs and film festivals.

artist statement (current, first person)
Fabrications sustain my work. The word fabrication (from fabricare: to make, to construct) describes the objects and stories that we craft for ourselves and each other. Fabrications, in terms of products, lean on the extractive, exploitative, and dehumanizing practices of capitalism. Fabrications, in terms of untruths, deceive and debase. But fabrications also flourish outside systems of exploitation and deception. Artists fabricate fictions with words, sounds, and materials that speak to broader truths and shared experiences.

My interest in fabrication started with the puppets in my mom’s therapy office. A furry family of beautifully-constructed dead things helped people in crisis build a fictive space for real emotion, real communication. From that collision of play, trauma, work, and healing, my body of work, focused on making and make-believe, has emerged. 

website info
I made this website in the summer/fall of 2023 using Wordpress and Oxygen Builder. I referenced veroniiica.com, perkins.org, and cooperhewitt.org for help with writing alt text and image descriptions. The display typeface is Space Grotesk and the body typeface is Roboto. You can download both at Google Fonts. The colors for the navigation bars come from the palettes packages for Strata graphs compiled by Ben Jann.

archive site until February 2024
cargocollective.com/averylawrence