Meghann Riepenhoff Works | Bio | Press | Exhibition views
American, b. 1979
Lives and works in Bainbridge Island, WA
Meghann Riepenhoff’s camera-less cyanotypes are created in collaboration with the landscape and the ocean, at the edges of both. Paper coated with homemade cyanotype emulsion are draped along the shore, across branches, or packed in snow. Rain and snow, tide and current, wind and sediment all leave physical inscriptions through direct contact with the photographic materials. The works in Riepenhoff’s related Littoral Drift and Ecotone stem from her fascination with the nature of our relationships to the landscape, the sublime, time, and impermanence. Her latest series, Ice, comprises works created in freezing waters. Photochemically, the pieces are never wholly processed, and will continue to slowly respond to the changing environments that they encounter over time.
Riepenhoff received her BFA from the University of Georgia, Athens, GA; and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, CA. Her work has been featured in the de Young Museum, San Francisco CA (2023); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2022); Portland Art Museum, OR (2021); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2018); New York Public Library, NY (2018); Denver Art Museum, CO (2018); Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, Chicago, IL (2017); and the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA (2017), among other institutions. Public collections holding her work include the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Worcester Museum of Art, MA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.
In 2018, Riepenhoff was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She has additionally been a recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation Grant (2015), and artist residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sasusalito, CA; and Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. work has been the subject of two monographs: Littoral Drift + Ecotone (2018) and Ice (2022), both published by Radius Books.