About

Ascension Structure, 2006, Ink and graphite on matte mylar, 8” x 10”

Bio

Courtney Jordan earned her MFA in 2006 from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s Hoffberger School of Painting, and her BFA in 1997 from the Rhode Island School of Design.  In 2011 she was the recipient of a Full Fellowship Award from the Vermont Studio Center.  Other residencies include the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, The MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and Ox-Bow in Michigan.  Selected awards include a 2013 artist grant from the Artist’s Resource Trust, a 2008 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, and a 2004 Individual Artist’s Grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.  Her work was included in editions 20, 44, and 69 of New American Paintings magazine, and in the 2013 book “100 Boston Artists” by Chawky Frenn (Schiffer Publishing Ltd.)  Jordan currently teaches in the Studio Foundation Department at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.  She lives and works in Amesbury, MA.  

Gray Space Transit, 2016, Gouache on Stonehenge paper, 6” x 9”

Artist Statement

Exploding and converging urban spaces, architecture, and infrastructure proliferate throughout my work.   My paintings and drawings are deeply rooted in the urban-industrial landscape.  The invented realities and imagined structures that I create are derived from often overlooked elements of urban infrastructure, including bridges, roadways, and industrial architecture.  By manipulating and recombining familiar elements already encoded with social and emotional values, the familiar becomes unfamiliar.  No longer functional yet still recognizable, these re-imagined, non-existent structures provide a link between our present experience and the continually changing landscape of our man-made world.