BIOGRAPHY

Athena LaTocha (b. Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist whose massive works on paper explore the relationship between human-made and natural worlds, in the wake of Earthworks artists from the 1960s and 1970s. The artist incorporates materials such as ink, lead, earth and wood, while looking at correlations between mark-marking and displacement of materials made by industrial equipment and natural events. Her works are informed by her upbringing in the wilderness of Alaska. LaTocha’s process is about being immersed in these environments, while responding to the storied and, at times, traumatic histories that are rooted in place.

LaTocha’s work has been shown at MoMA P.S.1 in Long Island City, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, New Jersey; Smack Mellon, The Green-Wood Cemetery, and BRIC House, Brooklyn, New York; CUE Art Foundation and Artists Space, New York City; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South Dakota; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Alaska.

Currently, LaTocha has work on view at the Human Rights Institute Gallery, Galleries at Kean University, Union, New Jersey; The Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York; the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, Vermont; and 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

LaTocha is the recipient of artist grants and awards, among them the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2024); Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2023); Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship (2023); Rockefeller Brothers Fund Pocantico Art Prize in Visual Arts (2022); Eiteljorg Fellowship, the National Academy Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting (2021); Joan Mitchell Foundation (2019, 2016); Wave Hill (2018); and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2013).

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The Art Newspaper, BOMB and Hyperallergic. LaTocha received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stony Brook University, New York. The artist lives and works in New York.