Colleen Blackard
Colleen Blackard, 'Behind the Fountain', 2025, Monotype on Paper, 45 x 66cm
Colleen Blackard is a monotype and installation artist from Austin, TX. She received her MFA in Studio Art at UT Austin in 2024, and her BA from Hampshire College in 2009.
She is the recipient of international residencies and fellowships such as Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, Atelierhaus Hilmsen in Germany, Cill Rialaig in Ireland, and Jentel in Wyoming. She received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2017 and the Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle Travel Fellowship in 2024, and she was the 2025 Jerry Manson Resident at Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Austin, TX, with a solo show, “An Unfound Door,” at Flatbed in January 2026. In Spring 2026, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant to support her International Residency at Cork Printmakers in Ireland, and she has been awarded the U.S. Fulbright Student Grant to continue her work in Cork through Spring 2027.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries such as ACA Galleries and Site:Brooklyn in NYC, Mönchskirche Gallery in Germany, ISSO Gallery in Tokyo, Foltz Fine Art in Houston, and SPRING/BREAK Art Show. Her work has been featured in Drawing Magazine, Artspace, the Japanese travel show, “Hotel no Madokora,” and "The Artist's Well," hosted by Alan Keane in Dublin.
Colleen Blackard’s artwork blends landscape and myth to create an otherworld for viewers to enter. She utilizes methods of printmaking, drawing, and installation to connect external landscapes to memories and dreams. As part of her process, she travels to remote sites to create artworks to share her experiences of these places with the local community and abroad.
Last year at Flatbed Press, Colleen created a series of monotypes responding to her recent travels through Italy. She found that even within the expansive Tuscan landscape, humanity has left an indelible mark, with valleys and hillsides turned to farmland and gardens enclosed by walls. Yet, while human history is entrenched in the land, nature moves freely across it all, encrusting borders and eroding walls, becoming something more within the ruins of these civilizations. Grapevines grow between cobblestone walkways and birds nest in trees and eaves alike. The overlaying of these buried histories inspired layering in my monotypes, with each glaze amplifying or obscuring aspects of the previous version. Just as time compressed these layers of history into a new landscape, the pressure of the printmaking press combined layers of ink into a new vision of the landscape that is both natural and man-made.