Elizabeth Erickson

Elizabeth Erickson (1942–2024) was an American painter, feminist artist, poet, and educator. Her painting style leaned towards gestural abstraction, and the themes she explored occupied "the territories of ancient myth, religion, and spiritual feminism," according to art historian Joanna Inglot.

Early life and education

Erickson was born into a middle-class Catholic family in Austin, Minnesota; her mother was a nurse and homemaker and her father was an entrepreneur. In 1964, she earned her B.A. from the College of Saint Teresa in Winona, Minnesota, and in 1998 she earned her M.F.A. in painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Work and career

Erickson was a founding member of the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota, also known as WARM. Spurred on by the coastal initiatives of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States, WARM began in 1976 as a women's art collective aimed at establishing "a center for women’s art that would lead to [its members'] recognition as professional artists."

In 1985, Erickson created a painting that is ambitious in both theme and scale called The Temple of Breath. The painting is constructed in a grid of twelve individual square paintings that together aim to reconcile the corporeal and cerebral acts of painting in a kind of visualization of meditation. Art historian Joanna Inglot explains: "By dividing each panel horizontally and vertically into grid-like sections, repeating black circular shapes in counterpoint with white diamonds and carefully measuring intervals between the forms, Erickson creates a sensation of expansion and contraction, 'in-and-out' movement throughout the entire composition. (...) [This painting] evolved out of years of quiet meditation at the Minnesota Zen Center." At the same time, Erickson's preoccupation with the grid format emerges from something deeper out of her childhood memory of a county road outside of Austin, where the viewer meets the landscape.

In the 1990s, Erickson embarked on a series of abstract paintings inspired by the life and art of the twelfth-century German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, whose preoccupation with language, light, and female spirituality remain a source of inspiration for Erickson. In her painting titled 101 Names of God: Awakener of Eternal Spring from 1996, Erickson creates a bristling field of short, white marks against a cobalt background interrupted in the upper center by a thin, vertical rectangular shape stippled with red mark; the painting appears to breathe and glow from within.