Elizabeth Gerdeman is a visual artist from Ohio and based between Germany and the USA. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA) from The Ohio State University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (BFA) from the Columbus College of Art and Design. She is the first in her family to receive a degree of higher education. During her undergraduate studies, Elizabeth was also a member of Americorps, part of the Corporation for National & Community Service, where she served in an after school program for “at-risk, inner city youth” in a neighborhood where she had attended school as a youth herself. Since 2008, she has taught at art academies and universities throughout the USA and Europe. Elizabeth is also founder of The Third Room, a community platform for public artist talks in Leipzig, Germany.
Her work was recently included in “Things That Were Are Things Again” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig (Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst), a group exhibition that tests sustainable strategies and highlights the technological, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of climate change. The year before, her work was shown in “Unterm Rock – Reflections on gender issues” [next;raum] at the Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig (Museum der Bildenden Künste), a collaborative group exhibition that dealt with representation and reception of gender constructions. In 2025, a solo exhibition, “A Weather Eye,” at the Francis McCray Gallery of Contemporary Art, featured experimentation with new artistic research formats and practices, embraced transdisciplinary and communal learning, and engaged with the local community in ways that delved deeper into the interrelationship of art and environment through the lens of weather phenomena experienced in the surrounding area. Displaying a combination of individual and collaborative projects, the exhibition incorporated a selection of artistic works conducted during Elizabeth’s tenure as Artist-in-Residence in the Expressive Arts Department at Western New Mexico University.
Elizabeth's work has been published in New American Paintings (Issue #161), and the “Project Anywhere” Global Exhibition Program supported by Parsons School of Art, Media and Technology, (Parsons School of Design, The New School, NYC) and the Centre of Visual Art, (University of Melbourne). Additional exhibition venues include among others the Modern Art Museum in Yerevan, Armenia; Athens Digital Arts Festival in Athens, Greece; Zorten Kunstraum in Grisons, Switzerland; Else Foundation Symposium in Mexico City, Mexico; and City Hall in Dresden, Germany.
“I examine the intermingling of land, architecture, and weather phenomena from interactions and perspectives that merge natural elements, built structures, meteorology, and local myths and folklore. My approach is multidisciplinary. I use a range of materials and methods to create abstract works that are rooted in an expanded painting practice and frequently situated as site-based interventions and installations.
My work integrates materials acquired locally, such as collecting found fabrics and home paint products, working with native plant dyes and pigments, and utilizing natural resources such as air, sunlight, soil, and rainwater.
My approach combines beauty and chaos in a vocabulary of abstraction that melts, stains, fractures, collapses, uncovers—often reflecting processes that evoke interior and exterior spaces in crisis. The resulting works are a reflection and exploration of “sense of place”—an expanded canvas upon which the complexities of space, energy, and ecology intertwine the tangible and the mystical.
I aim to spark conversations that not only celebrate the awe and intensity of the changing world around us, but that also challenge us to consider our roles and intentions within it. How do our perceptions of landscape influence the value of nature, thresholds between exterior and interior spaces, and a desire for control amongst turmoil? In what ways do we search for connections to our environments, and how do we envision our relationships with these environments in the future?”