Former Dodd Chair Lauren Fensterstock has been selected as one of the four artists featured in Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020. Forces of Nature is the ninth installment of the Renwick Invitational. Established in 2000, this biennial showcase highlights midcareer and emerging makers who are deserving of wider national recognition.

Nature provides a way for these invited artists to ask what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Representing craft media from fiber to mosaic to glass and metals, these artists approach the long history of art’s engagement with the natural world through unconventional and highly personal perspectives.  

Lauren Fensterstock creates detailed, large-scale installations using labor-intensive modes of making drawn from the decorative arts, including paper quilling and mosaic. For this exhibition, SAAM has commissioned a site-specific work—the first in a new series for the artist inspired by sources like The Book of Miracles, a richly illustrated sixteenth-century German manuscript—that transforms an entire gallery at the Renwick into a celestial landscape and captures the power and awe inherent in natural phenomena.

The exhibition will on view at the Renwick Gallery in Washington DC until June 27, 2021.