https://athenalatocha.com/home.html
Athena LaTocha (b. Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist whose massive works on paper explore the relationship between human-made and natural worlds, in the wake of Earthworks artists from the 1960s and 1970s. The artist incorporates materials such as ink, lead, earth and wood, while looking at correlations between mark-marking and displacement of materials made by industrial equipment and natural events. Her works are informed by her upbringing in the wilderness of Alaska. LaTocha’s process is about being immersed in these environments, while responding to the storied and, at times, traumatic histories that are rooted in place.
Her work has been shown across the country in places such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; CUE Art Foundation and Artists Space, New York City; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South Dakota; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Alaska. In 2021, her work was on view in Land Akin at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York and ID: Formations of the Self at Shirley Fiterman Art Center in New York City. Also in 2021, she had two solo exhibitions in the New York City area: Athena LaTocha: In the Wake of . . . on view at BRIC House in downtown Brooklyn; and Athena LaTocha: After the Falls at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit. Her work was additionally featured in Greater New York 2021, at MoMA P.S.1 in Long Island City. During 2022 and early 2023, she has had solo exhibitions at JDJ | The Ice House in Garrison, New York; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and at The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Currently, LaTocha has work on view the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and The Green-Wood Cemetery.
LaTocha is the recipient of artist grants and awards, among them the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Pocantico Art Prize in Visual Arts in 2022, Eiteljorg Fellowship, the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting in 2021, Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2019 and 2016, Wave Hill in 2018, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2013. LaTocha received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stony Brook University, New York. The artist divides her time between New York City and Peekskill, New York.
STATEMENT
Having grown up in Alaska, my understanding of the land was influenced by both the rugged monumentality of the terrain and the impact of the oil and gas industry upon the land. To this day, I feel a natural affinity for places and things that evoke those memories, such as the mountains and deserts of the southwest, and excavation sites and earthmoving equipment found in the industrial landscape.
I unfurl large rolls of paper on the floor and immerse myself in the painting, much like being in the landscape. Working from the inside out, I disperse a palette of earth-toned inks with distilled water and industrial solvents, and use aggressive tools such as wire brushes, scrap metal, and reclaimed tire shreds to push the ink around. Surrounded on all sides by the expanse of paper, I move through the work as if I am traversing the terrain.