About the Artist
Beth Whitney is a Jersey City based artist whose practice has taken a circuitous route since graduating from RISD in 1989 with a BFA in printmaking, where she concentrated less on printing editions and more on running anything she could scavenge from the streets through the presses. With the exception of a short, ill-advised stint skating for Disney on Ice, she spent her post college years as an interface designer and art director for software and multimedia companies while spending her free time training for competitive long distance running events.
By early 2001 she’d qualified for the Women’s Olympic Marathon Trials, placed in the top 20 at the Boston Marathon, and been named to the World Championships USA Marathon Team. By late 2001 she’d broken bones in both legs repeatedly, splintering a tibia beyond full recovery and ending a running career. Recognizing she was uniquely skilled at following “break a leg†advice, she subsequently moved to New York City to fulfill an earlier dream of building props and decorating theatre sets.
After a number of years working in theatre, crafting objects and decorating sets for countless award winning productions, she began to realize how much she missed giving physical form to ideas of her own and enrolled in Montclair State University’s MFA program in 2008. In 2009 she was awarded a graduate assistantship en-route to earning an MFA in studio arts in 2010.
She has participated in a number of group shows in the greater New York City metro area as well as many collaborative, unsanctioned art exhibits and interventions. When she’s not spending time in her Jersey City studio, she’s busy designing and developing websites and web-based applications and creating editorial illustrations. In addition she is employed as a Teaching Artist by Rutgers Paul Robeson Galleries, where she leads art outreach workshops in correctional facilities and other under-served communities within Newark, NJ.