Allison Hunter (CV)

Allison Hunter is a multi-media artist working primarily in video and photography, which she uses to uncover beauty in the everyday and to highlight marginalized subjects. Hunter attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York (MFA 1997, Electronic Art) after graduating from the Ecole Cantonal d’Art de Lausanne, Switzerland (Diplôme, 1990, Drawing/Photography). She has won four Individual Artist Grants and a large-scale commission from the Houston Arts Alliance since 2006. Hunter had solo exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh), Women & Their Work (Austin),  DiverseWorks (Houston), and 511 Gallery, (NYC). Collections holding her work include the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Art Museum of the University of Albany, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston among others. Over her thirty-year career as an artist, She has participated in residencies such as the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada; Open-Air Art Museum, Pedvale, Latvia, and the Hermit Center for Metamedia, Plasy, Czech Republic, among others. Her recent participation in art residencies include the NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, New York (April – June 2019), the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont (July, 2018), The Ayatana Research Residency, Ontario, Canada (September, 2018), the  Sculpture and New Media Residency at the School of Visual Arts, New York (June/July, 2017), and at La Porte Peinte Centre Pour les Arts, Noyers, France (December, 2017). From 2012 to 2020, Hunter was the Humanities Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts at Rice University where she taught courses on digital photography, experimental video, and video installation. She is relocating from Houston, Texas to New York City as a full-time artist in 2021.

Artist Statement on New Animals Series

New Animals (2005-2007) is a series of photographs in which I depict animals I photographed in zoos and nature preserves mostly throughout Texas from 2005 to 2007. I digitally manipulated my files by removing the backgrounds and replacing them with colors digitally sampled from the original environment. This work looks at the complex relationship between humans and animals.

Work from this series is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston collection, among others. And an artist talk from the solo, at 511 Gallery in Chelsea, NY, show based on this series on VernissageTV. It has also been featured in German newspaper Frankfurter Rundshchau, HOUSTON, and other publications.