Colette Copeland is an interdisciplinary visual artist, arts educator and arts writer based in Granbury, Texas. Inspired by Dada and Fluxus, her artistic practice combines personal narratives, history, and contemporary culture to address global issues such as the environmental crisis and gender oppression. She uses a variety of media including video, photography, sound, performance, printmaking and sculptural installation. Her performance videos utilize experimental narrative strategies to map the complexities of human and non-human relationships. Most recently, her eco-performances with other-than-human collaborators respond to the land and its inhabitants.
For the past three years, she has been working on a community-based, collaborative, experimental sound project amplifying Texas voices that have been historically silenced, including female, non-binary and queer voices. The work has been exhibited in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Lubbock and Little Rock, Arkansas.
Over the past 34 years, Copeland’s work has been featured in 40 solo exhibitions and 170 group exhibitions and festivals across 35 countries. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Syracuse University and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Texas. She is the recipient of a Leeway Foundation Award for Art & Change and 2020 Kevin Mullins Memorial Award and was awarded a Fulbright Scholar Research Award for 2023/2024 researching and writing about contemporary female artists in India.
For ten years, Copeland volunteered with Traffick911, an organization who helps sex trafficked youth. She served in the capacity of volunteer coordinator, public advocacy, community awareness and education. She also volunteered in juvenile detention facilities teaching Nia dance therapy to incarcerated teen girls.
Copeland writes cultural and arts criticism for Glasstire, the oldest online-only art magazine in the country, as well as Arteidolia, an online arts and creative writing journal. She has also written for The Photo Review, Afterimage Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Eutopia Contemporary Art Reviews, and Exposure Journal. She is a member of AICA–International Association of Art Critics.
She proudly admits to providing her children with years of “therapy” fodder.
Contact Colette Copeland: colettemedia@aol.com