LORI K. GORDON
Lori K. Gordon was born in the Northern Plains, and spent her childhood on the prairies of eastern South Dakota. As a teen, she began moving west and then south, living for years in the Black Hills of South Dakota and the high desert of Arizona. Along the way, she picked up a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in religious studies, all the while pursuing her love of art. She has traveled extensively in the United States, painting and drawing her way from the west to east coasts, and from Canada to Mexico. In 1991 she made the Mississippi Gulf Coast her home. Largely self taught, Gordon works in many medias including graphite, fabric, acrylic, handmade paper and polymer clay. She is especially fond of collage and assemblage work, and introduced her first mixed media series in 2000. Three years later, one of her pieces was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution for inclusion into their permanent collection. “Labat: A Creole Legacy” is an eight by ten foot fabric collage which tells the story, in images and text, of the life of a Bay St. Louis Creole woman who died in 2002 at the age of 104.
In 2003 Gordon began capturing the local landscapes of her beloved Mississippi Gulf Coast in acrylic, and continued that work until Hurricane Katrina upended her life on August 29, 2005. With her home, studio and all of her supplies washed away by the 43 foot storm surge and 150 mile per hour winds which obliterated her community, Gordon returned to work using the only materials which were available to her. Five weeks after the event, Gordon began collecting rubble and transforming it into works of art. “The Katrina Collection” has been featured by MSNBC, CBS, National Public Radio, Christian Science Monitor, Associated Press, Art Gulf Coast, South Mississippi Living, and in dozens of newspapers around the nation. The artist has been featured in several documentaries as well, including Art of the Storm, the award-winning Mississippi Son, and Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s Mississippi Roads and Southern Expressions. Collectors of her work include President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama, former President and First Lady Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, ESPN announcer Jon Miller, singer Faith Hill, Los Angeles producer Don Wilson, and Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts. In addition to the Smithsonian, public collections which have acquired her work include Mississippi Humanities Council, Katrina Research Center, University of Virginia, University of Southern Mississippi, William J Clinton Foundation and Thea Foundation’s Art Across Arkansas, Seattle’s Safeco Corporate Collection, Hancock Medical Center, Katrina Museum, and Alice Moseley Museum. Gordon has exhibited her work around the nation, and pieces of the series may be found in Europe and Asia as well as across the United States.
While Gordon continues creating in The Katrina Collection, she has begun work in several new series. The Reliquary Series, which debuted in Mississippi in January of 2008, is another collection of mixed media assemblages which focuses on images of the sacred. Most recently, the artist has been creating collages on canvas which combine photography, digital imagery, acrylics and handmade paper. These collages are gleaned from photos taken by the artist in Turkey, Cyprus and various locations in the United States. In January 2010, Gordon released a new collection of mixed media pieces which she calls “Found Object Mosaics.”
Gordon is currently represented by Work of Art in Gulfport, MS and in Madisonville, LA; Gallery 220 in Bay St Louis, MS; Sumner & Dene Gallery in Albuquerque, NM; and Brown’s Fine Art in Jackson, MS. Her work may be seen on her website at www.lorikgordon.org, and a complete bio may be found online at Wikipedia. Tours of her studio may be arranged and the artist may be reached at lorikgordon@gmail.com. To see more of Gordon's work, please click on the links located on the upper right section of this page. To watch a 20-minute film on Gordon and her work, scroll down.
