Marc Swanson

Marc Swanson (born in New Britain, Connecticut, United States) is an artist based in Brooklyn.

Marc Swanson received his MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2004, and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Skowhegan, Maine, in 2000.

He is a contemporary American artist whose notably hand-made work is brings together formal preoccupations and references to personal history and identity conflict. He works in a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, video, photography, and complex installations. As art critic David Velasco notes, "Swanson is an automythologist, one who excels in crafting sparkling, enigmatic totems from the messiness of his own history; there kitsch and confession dovetail to reveal, not obscure, visceral thirsts." His work was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, at Cornell University, in 2008, and the accompanying catalogue was published in 2009, with an essay by Bill Arning. His work has been included in group exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Miami Art Museum; and the Saatchi Gallery, London.

Marc Swanson grew up the son of a former Marine and avid hunter in small-town New England. He then moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, and became involved in the city's gay counterculture and club scene. He did not feel totally at home in either place, and he began making crystal-covered deer head sculptures as a way to explore, both physically and spiritually, the duality of masculine identities he was experiencing.

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