Lisa Nilsson

Lisa Nilsson grew up in Avon, Massachusetts with patient and skilled parents who taught her to work well with herself. She found early inspiration in the makers of things in her family, including her father, a retired graphic designer and garage inventor, and his brother, an illustrator. Members of her family sewed, knitted, painted houses and watercolors, repaired car bodies, fashioned end tables and snow scrapers in Plexiglas, and mixed colors for false teeth. Lisa was always happiest when making stuff. She went to the Rhode Island School of Design and mostly learned about making illustrations. She got a BFA and after art school worked first as an illustrator at American Greetings in Cleveland and later as a freelance for Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated and the Utne Reader. Not fully satisfied with life as an illustrator, Lisa took the opportunity to work on a two-year collaborative project with The New Art Factory, a group of three visual artists. They made large-scale Japanese-style folding screens and modeled their art-making methods after those of rock bands. As she saw her own slowly rendered contributions juxtaposed with the spontaneous, loopy, energetic work of her “band mates,” she found she enjoyed her pieces best as a part of a widely diverse whole. Adopting approaches from her group experience, she now works as a one-man band, collaborating with a multiplicity of materials and ideas within a single piece of work. In 2003 she moved to North Adams to live and work at the Eclipse Mill, where she feels at home in a city with a history of manufacturing shoes, bricks, capacitors, and pretty printed cloth. She likes to be read to while she works and listens to books on tape constantly. She likes to take long slow swims across still bodies of water.