About

Liz Ward is an American artist working primarily with painting, drawing, printmaking, cyanotype, and collage. She produces large-scale mixed-media works on paper, as well as intimate silverpoint drawings, wall-sized installations, and public art projects for architectural settings. Her work explores the meaning of landscape through layers of human, natural, and environmental history, memory, and experience. Recent projects are Ghosts of the Old Mississippi, a series of fifteen large drawings based on geological maps of the alluvial plain of the Mississippi Rivera, and silverpoint drawings for Unchopping a Tree with poet W.E. Merwin. Her combined interests in art and the environment have led to interdisciplinary collaborative teaching and research experiences with biologists, poets, and social scientists in Colorado and Costa Rica. 

Ward has been included in over two-hundred group shows, and she has completed over thirty solo exhibitions in galleries, artist-run spaces, and museums. Exhibition venues include the Contemporary Arts Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina, and the International Print Center in New York. Her work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the San Antonio Museum of Art; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, and the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin, and others.

Her work has been recognized with a Brown Foundation Fellowship for an Artist Residency at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France; two Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowships, and the Dozier Travel Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. She has been awarded residencies at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and Isle Royale National Park in Michigan. 

Ward was born in Lafayette, Louisiana, and grew up in Houston, Texas.  She attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, and received a B.F.A cum laude with honors in art from the University of New Mexico. After studying art in Paris, she returned to Houston, where she received an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Houston. She is a professor in the Department of Art and Art History, and an Environmental Studies Faculty member, at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She lives and works in San Antonio and in Eagle Harbor, Michigan.

Contact:

Lizdayward@mac.com; Instagram: @lizardward

Moody Gallery, Houston: info@moodygallery.com
Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas:  info@hollyjohnsongallery.com 

Liz Ward and her artwork
The artist with Green Glacial Ghost in the new Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Kinder Building, January 2021