Lauren Krukowski
2024 West Bay View Foundation Fellow

West Bay View Fellowship recipient, Lauren Krukowski joined us at Dieu Donné in August 2024. Lauren’s fellowship provided her access to our studios, a stipend, and close guidance from our artistic directors to push their understanding of collaboration and their own artistic practice.

Lauren Krukowski’s work is closely tied to her environment and responds directly to the personal and social concerns of her everyday world. Working between printmaking, papermaking, and textile processes, Lauren draws inspiration from textiles, quilts, windows, and the natural world to create abstract designs in handmade paper, which she often cuts up and sews into new forms. These constructed paper quilts offer Lauren an intimate connection to her home and her family, especially her mother, who taught Lauren to sew at a young age and decorated the walls of her childhood home with quilts. Lauren’s new work Meadow Constellation is influenced by two moments of awe in visiting the Ashton Prairie Living Lab prairie reconstruction project at the University of Iowa, where the artist earned her MFA in 2024, and the experience of seeing the Northern Lights over the Iowa River this summer, shortly before returning to New York. Meadow Constellation explores the contradictions between the beauty and toxicity of the river—a place of personal significance—and the effort to slow erosion and pollution in the waterway by restoring native plant ecosystems. Abstracting imagery and creating repeatable patterns from these experiences, Lauren creates parallel processes in her papermaking and printmaking practices to those seen in textile patterning or quilting.


Learn more about the Ashton Prairie Living Lab here: https://prairierestoration.course.uiowa.edu/#what-are-some-of-the-ecological-services-or-benefits-of-a-prairie-reconstruction


Learn more about nitrogen pollution affecting the Iowa River and downstream waterways here: https://blue-gap.org/index.html

About the Artist

Lauren Krukowski (she/her) has an unwavering desire to produce color relationships that arouse deep emotional responses, similar to the musical frisson she experiences from vocal harmonies. Her work moves fluidly through hand papermaking, printmaking, and textile processes—connecting through color and tactility. Lauren is the 2024-25 West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné. Additional awards and artist residencies have supported her work, including the Stanley Award for International Research Fellowship (2022), Print Workshop Residency at David Krut Workshop (2022), Leola Bergman Fellowship (2021-22), Guttenberg Arts' Space and Time Artist Residency (2020), and the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship Residency at Anderson Center (2016). Recent exhibitions include "And, And, And," (solo) at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics' Project Art Gallery, "Windows" (solo) at the University of Iowa's Ana Mendieta Gallery (IA), and "Reclaimed and Recycled" at Public Space One (IA). In 2024, Lauren earned an MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa with a secondary focus in papermaking at the Center for the Book. She holds a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in 2010. After her West Bay View Foundation Fellowship at Dieu Donné, Lauren will spend six weeks as an artist in residence at PenArt in Door County, Wisconsin.

For more information, please visit:
laurenkrukowskistudio.com
@lauren.krukowski