Lisa J. Grossman
Mid-Career Fellowship in Visual and Fine Art

Lisa Grossman is a full-time painter and printmaker living in Lawrence, Kansas. She earned an associate’s degree from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a BFA in painting at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

Since 1998, Grossman has had fourteen solo shows around the Midwest and on both coasts. Her work has appeared in regional museum shows including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri and the Mulvane rt Museum in Topeka. The Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park have acquired her paintings.

Grossman’s work has been widely recognized. She has been accepted into numerous juried exhibitions around the country and has received many purchase awards. Grossman took “Best in Show” at the 2006 Lawrence Own your Own Exhibit and in that same year, was commission by H&R Block Center and Leopold Gallery to create a 10’ x 12’ painting for their headquarters’ main lobby in downtown Kansas City. In 2000, Grossman was the recipient of the Kansas Arts Commission’s mini-Fellowship. Grossman’s painting was selected for the Arts For the Parks Top 100, national touring exhibition out of Jackson, Wyoming and she was also chosen to be an Artist-In-Residence at Rocky Mountain National Park. Grossman’s paitings have graced the walls of the Kansas Governor’s offices and mansion and her work was included in the 2007 Inaugural exhibit and publication, Not By Bread Alone.  Grossman has twice been featured in New American Paintings.

Artist Statement

Since moving to this region in 1988, Lisa Grossman has been inspired by Kansas's prairies, skies, and river valleys. In her paintings and prints, Grossman has pursued a vision of open space and distance, employing minimalism and subtlety and ephemeral shifts in light, season, and weather, with fluid brushwork and sensitive color. From her earliest plein air work to recent large studio paintings and print panels, she's striven to express her experience of particular ecosystems during periods of keen attention. Grossman increasingly finds herself ever more embedded in place; she walks the prairies, explores waterways by kayak, and views the river valley from the air, and studies the skies daily.

Grossman has shared her work with audiences from coast to coast and as far as Beijing, China. She has taught painting workshops in Flint Hills communities and the Wakarusa Wetlands near Lawrence, and led a printmaking workshop at the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City. Grossman also works with Kansas non-profits, such as the Kansas Land Turst and Friends of the Kaw, to find visual solutions that support preservation work and celebrate the riches of our floodplain soils, prairies, and open space.

After slide presentations in art centers, museums, galleries and classrooms, people often comment that Grossman has helped them see a place in a new way. It is her hope that she urges viewers toward a deeper awareness of place - their own backyard, specific places in Kansas, as well as their place in the wider earth community.