AE Originals

Amy E. Bartell is an artist, activist and teacher. Working with ink, handmade papers, watercolor, photography, digital and mixed media — her broad approach to media gives voice to message and meaning. Whether posters, prints or photographs, her work offers a glimpse into her view of the world. She believes in the power of art as a tool for change.

Her work addresses issues of social justice and diversity and is distributed internationally through such venues as the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, California and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her commissioned works include: The National Organization for Women, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Worcester Women’s History Project, Vera House, The Q Center and for the Freedom to Marry Campaign. She has also created over two dozen murals on college campuses and for non-profit organizations including: SUNY Oswego, Syracuse University, Carleton College, California State, Wells College, Towson University, Monmouth University, The Food Bank of CNY, AIDS Community Resources, University of Connecticut, University of New Hampshire and Washington State University. She is the recipient of the Unsung Heroine Award from the National Organization for Women and the Rubenstein Social Justice Award from Syracuse University.

Her latest and ongoing investigation is a body of work called “Dear World” – and speaks to a world frayed at the edges. 

Artist’s Statement: 

Dear World is a series of mixed media images that speak to a delicate, splintered landscape of dualities with cracks through which ineffable beauty has grown but stories have fallen. Edges where so much has been marginalized and so many are woundable.

Dear World is a gathering of petals, branches, shadows, beach glass, clay, pebbles, paint, ink, and loose ends. I meander at the edges of paths and parking lots; I take photos of what is tossed, blown, still. In the dailiness of sketching, I draw spirals, cells and water, over and over. The patterns are soothing and their repetition chisels new routes for my thoughts. I paint and assemble, I make hoops from clay and bridges from thin air.

Dear World is a plea, a prayer, an elegy, a love letter. It is a reliquary of nests, the enigma of our shared sky, the flown air of birds. This work is a reckoning with the moment we have, and a reverence for the stitches we hold onto at the seams.