18 Facts About Ellen Carey

Ellen Carey is an American artist known for conceptual photography that explores non-traditional approaches involving process, exposure and paper.

Ellen Carey's work has ranged from painted and multiple-exposure, Polaroid 20 x 24, Neo-Geo self-portraits beginning in the late 1970s to cameraless, abstract photograms and minimal Polaroid images from the 1990s onward, which critics compare to color-field painting.

Ellen Carey's work belongs to the museum collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Ellen Carey studied at the Art Students League of New York before attending the Kansas City Art Institute, where she earned a BFA in 1975.

Ellen Carey was part of a mid-1970s Buffalo, NY avant-garde while in graduate school at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Ellen Carey was one of the first artists invited into the Polaroid Corporation's program to sponsor artists interested in exploring the potential of its "instant film"; the technology played a key role in her Neo-Geo, post-psychedelic self-portraits of the 1980s and her later "Photography Degree Zero" abstract work.

Since 1991, Ellen Carey has divided time between living and working in Hartford, Connecticut and New York City.

Ellen Carey has experimented with the medium's chemical, light-related, color and material properties, often rejecting its documentary dimension and hierarchical relations of subject and object in favor of possibilities residing between painting and sculpture, realized through the manipulation of process and printing.

Ellen Carey began creating cameraless photograms in 1989, which specifically explored abstraction and conceptual issues at the basis of photography, through a process embracing chance, improvisation, and risk.

Ellen Carey's "Zerograms" reflect elements of her parallel "Pulls" series, incorporating a stark, geometric void in their centers that suggests a new sense of illusory space.

Ellen Carey's early "Pulls" often used a subdued palette, as in the three installations, Mourning Wall, Birthday Portrait and Family Portrait, which expressed grief over family losses; William Zimmer described the diverse textures of Mourning Wall's gray slabs as achieving the effect of relief sculpture.

Ellen Carey's later "Pulls" and related series often incorporate startling flares or "waterfalls" of bright, sometimes overlapping color against blazing white grounds.

Ellen Carey's work is in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Fox Talbot Museum, George Eastman Museum, Henry Art Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Britain Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Whitney Museum, and William Benton Museum of Art, as well as private collections.

Ellen Carey has received awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Polaroid Artists Support Program, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, New York State Federation for Artists, Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts, among others.

Ellen Carey has written about and researched art-related topics such as the history of photography, color theory, and tetrachromacy and its relation to gender.

Ellen Carey has published essays on Sol LeWitt, Man Ray, and her own work.

Ellen Carey has taught photography at the Hartford Art School since 1985.

Ellen Carey has taught at Bard College, the International Center for Photography, and Queens College, and been an artist-in-residence at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.