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Lecture and Reception

March 5, 2026, 5:30-6:30 pm (Wilson Hall’s Concert Hall)

About the Exhibition

Emma Steinkraus creates colorful, figurative paintings that blend surface precision with playful, strange, and exuberant imagery. Her process is anchored in visual research, weaving together wide-ranging art historical references with a contemporary sensibility. In this series, she reinterprets scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, using them to explore themes of femininity, transformation, and the porous boundary between humans and other species.

Steinkraus’s work is represented by 1969 Gallery in New York, NY, and has been included in recent exhibitions at the UNTITLED Art Fair (Miami, FL), Sow & Tailor x WOAW Gallery (Hong Kong, China), the StadtPalais Museum (Stuttgart, Germany), and Hashimoto Contemporary (Los Angeles, CA). She has attended artist residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ox-Bow, the Wassaic Project, and the Blue Mountain Center, among many others. Recent awards include the Eliza Moore Fellowship at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in 2020 and a Helen Frankenthaler Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in 2022. Her work has been on the cover of New American Paintings and featured in Artsy, Burnaway, BOOOOOOOM, Art Maze Magazine, and Juxtapoz.  She lives and works in Lexington, Virginia.

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