bio:
Annie Heckman is an artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work explores mortality through diverse media, incorporating sculptural animation installations and works on paper. She has shown her work in numerous spaces, including the New York Studio Gallery; the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training & Research in New York; Cine Capellini in New York; the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, Texas; the Hammes Gallery at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana; the South Bend Regional Museum of Art; The Garage in Brooklyn; the International Print Center New York; the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, Massachusetts; the F.U.E.L. Collection in Philadelphia; the Plugged Video Collective in Tuscon; the Congress Center in Balatonfüred, Hungary; and the Central EU Gallery (KIKA) in Budapest, Hungary.
Born in Chicago in 1981, Annie grew up in the nearby suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois. Her early training stems from after-school art classes at an artist’s storefront studio on the Northwest side of Chicago. There she studied drawing and painting, eventually becoming a teaching assistant and co-founding the Blue Spider Art Studio, a neighborhood arts center following in the tradition of the earlier storefront studio. Annie taught drawing, painting, and art history lessons, developing an ongoing curriculum for three years and directing the center’s educational programs with visiting instructors. She studied painting, sculpture, and printmaking at the University of Illinois at Chicago while coordinating this business, earning her BFA in Studio Art in December of 2002. Following graduation, Annie traveled with Loyola University Chicago’s summer program to study Italian language, literature, and art history in Rome during the summer of 2003.
In the summer of 2004, Annie moved to Brooklyn to study Studio Art at New York University’s Department of Art & Art Professions. There she began making video projects and etchings simultaneously, slowly uniting these practices in what would become her Airline to Heaven animation series. She attended a residency through the Hungarian Multicultural Center in the winter of 2005-6, continuing to develop her animation and enriching it with work by musicians she encountered in Budapest & Csopak. Annie returned to New York and presented her thesis, Airline to Heaven, Part I, an animation project installed in an environment built out of fabric sculpture, presented alongside a suite of works on paper and writings. She received her MFA in Studio Art in May of 2006, going on to co-found, direct, and teach painting in the department’s All Access Summer Program.
Annie relocated to Chicago in the fall of 2006, setting up her studio to create large-scale animation installations. Her writing practice has included short prose as well as art writing & editing for exhibition catalogs, and she founded StepSister Press in late 2007 to promote discourse on emerging international art, literature, and critical theory projects. Her collection of texts Airline to Heaven, Part I was released in July 2008, with writings by Terri L. Russ and Matthew Dal Santo.
Her recent exhibition projects in 2010 include You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time, a solo project at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, the premiere of Airline to Heaven, Part II in a group exhibit at NY Studio Gallery, and Love Letters to Antarctica, a collaborative exhibit with artist Lorien Jordan at Swimming Pool Project Space in Chicago. She is currently developing two large-scale projects, Airline to Heaven, Part III and Eden Boy. Her teaching projects include recent work with teens at the Art Institute of Chicago, and dialogue-based tours and teacher workshops at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in DePaul University's Department of Art, Media, and Design.
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