Mara Adamitz Scrupe

Mara Adamitz Scrupe is an American artist, writer, and a university professor and educator.
Scrupe's place-based art installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally, with commissions of her environmentally-attuned public art projects in the US, South America, Europe and Taiwan.
Her essays and critical reviews have been published in magazines and periodicals and reprinted in art reference books. In 2013 her first chapbook of poems entitled Sky Pilot was nominated for the 16th Library of Virginia Literary Awards.
Scrupe has lectured and taught widely in the United States and abroad and currently serves as Professor of Interdisciplinary Art at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Professional background
Since the 1980's, Scrupe has lived in Philadelphia, Washington DC, Charlottesville,Virginia, and San Antonio, Texas, where she has been active in the art world as a visual artist, poet, art writer, arts administrator and curator, and professor.
She has received grants and fellowships from the CEC/ArtsLink/National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Virginia Commission for the Arts, Sculpture Space (New York), Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation (Baltimore), Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Djerassi Foundation (California), Artists Space (NYC), Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), MoKs KülalisStuudio, (Mooste, Estonia), Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Europos Parkas (Vilnius, Lithuania), and the Council of Bergen, Norway/Stiftelsen Kulturhuset USF.
As a public artist, Mara Adamitz Scrupe has received commissions for new works including Suspicious Science installed at Europos Parkas Sculpture Park in Vilnius, Lithuania, Fota Lichens Project for Fota House and Gardens in Cork, Ireland, and Ilan Lichens for the College of Bioresources of Ilan University, Taiwan.
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions of Scrupe's installations and public interventions include I Own This Land, The Center for Book Arts, New York, How To Make A Place in the World, University Art Museum, Indiana State University, Pie Social, 10th Unfringed Festival, Limerick, Ireland, Archaeo-entropy: Intercession for a Deactivated Airbase, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah, Fota Lichen Project, Fota House and Gardens/Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland, Back To Nature: Collecting the Preserved Garden, GrandArts, Kansas City, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Rococo Wood, The Abington Art Center Sculpture Garden, Philadelphia, Sanctuary and Ice Storm, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Flood Stage, Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University, Garden for the Third Coast: Buffalo Bayou Plants Project, Buffalo Bayou ArtPark, Houston, Paradise, and Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Papers and presentations
Scrupe has presented papers at various national and international meetings and conferences including The University of New Mexico Mentoring Institute 2013 Conference, Mentoring Cultural Activism: facilitating understanding our common humanity, (presented with Professor Lonnie Graham, Pennsylvania State University), School of Visual Arts 26th National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists, papers entitled: Making/Meaning/Matter and Recto-Verso/Verso-Recto, or the art of reading and picturing (the latter with Professor Suzanne Silver/The Ohio State University), 2008 College Art Association Conference, Historical Studies Session Co-Chair with Dr. Claire Black McCoy; The Sculptor and the Garden, Women's Caucus for Art (2008), Georgia Chapter, Keynote Speaker: The Artist and the Environment, Ferst Center for the Arts, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Twenty-first Annual Conference: CODE, Survival Principle: the Art of Nurturing Nature, 2007 Southeastern College Art Association Annual Conference, Social Art & Agency: Art of Resistance, 1999 Arts Now Conference, State University of New York, New Paltz, , and Mid-America College Art Association Annual Conference (1998), Keynote Speaker: Finding Courage Off the Beaten Path:Examining the Roles and Resources of Provincial Artists in the Next Millennium.
Education and teaching
A native of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Mara Adamitz Scrupe earned a BA in French and francophone studies from Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, where she studied languages, art, and literature. She earned an MFA at Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in New York. She has taught and lectured nationally and internationally and was the first Barbara Bishop Endowed Chair in Art at Longwood University in Virginia, and held the inaugural Alan F. Rothschild Distinguished Professorship at Columbus State University in Georgia.
Scrupe is professor of interdisciplinary arts, and director of the university common curriculum at The University of the Arts in inner city Philadelphia where she teaches and mentors culturally and ethnically diverse students across a range of disciplines including creative writing, art, design, dance, music and theatre.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu