Bio/Statement

Lauren Boilini was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana. She received her BFA in Painting and Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a painter she also works in installation and public art, completing commissions for the Maryland Department of Public Health and the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, with an upcoming project at the Renton Transit Center in the works. She has been an artist-in-residence at Canserrat Spain, Jentel Arts in Wyoming, Soaring Gardens in Pennsylvania, the Studios of Key West, the Burren College of Art in Ireland, Studio Art Centers International (SACI) in Florence, the Creative Alliance and School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, and won a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. She received a grant to publish an artist book and spent time at MASS MoCA and Furman University finishing the sequel, alongside a solo exhibition at Pacific Lutheran University, with a residency at the Amazon headquarters the following spring. In 2023 she was the first artist-in-residence at the Missoula Butterfly House and a fellowship from the McMillen Foundation helped to fund a residency on Vashon the following summer. Lauren was a 2025 finalist for the Neddy Award in Painting, with research-based residencies at UVA’s Biological Station and Texas A&M’s Laguna Madre Station in Corpus Christi this past summer. She is looking forward to her first solo museum exhibition at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art this coming March.

Lauren currently teaches painting and drawing at The Evergreen State College. Working with other artists has been vital to her practice and she is developing a project for SeaTac’s South Concourse with her frequent collaborator, Henry Cowdery. She is also a marathon open water swimmer and with her family nearby, loves to call Seattle home.

Lauren is represented by J.Rinehart Gallery www.jrinehartgallery.com/artists/lauren… in Seattle and
Museo Gallery museo.cc/lauren-boilini on Whidbey Island.




In my current body of work I look at the idea of excess, when images of excess become meaningless and fall into the realm of pattern. This idea of gluttony is reflected in our current culture. We are a hedonistic society, always looking for more until the more we are looking for loses its meaning.

Research, reading and exploration are vital to my studio practice, consistently driving my work forward. I continuously seek and study epic narratives, creating my own for each work. I am fascinated with crowds of people converging in one space at one time. This includes religious practices, festivals, political gatherings, orgies, feeding frenzies, stampedes, riots, migrations, etc. Recently I have been drawn to images of battles and duels; I am interested in what drives us to violence and destruction of life.

My studio practice has consistently been painting, often extending into the realm of installation. Though I traditionally work on a large-scale, in 2016 I was awarded a grant to create a small book of drawings loosely based around the structure of a graphic novel, to which I recently finished the sequel. I built the book sequentially, telling the story behind paintings I have been working on for the past ten years. It consists of small drawings that investigate my thoughts on sport and war, and their shared violence. Image-based, the story takes place on a fictional island in which only male members of different species have survived, and explores the destruction that follows. In this second book, the human men have died off, and their animal counterparts have been left to take over the island and fight for power. The development of this narrative has guided the content of new work, moving me back and forth between large and small, and leading me into a third in the series of artist books.