Mernet Larsen

Mernet Larsen is Professor Emeritus of Painting at University of South Florida, where she taught for 35 years, receiving the university’s highest distinctions for teaching. She has also taught at Yale, Montana State, and the University of Oklahoma, in summer programs in Paris, Rome and Yale/Norfolk, and has been a visiting artist at, for example, Rhode Island School of Design, Antioch College, New York Studio School, and Nanjing (China) School of Art. She initiated and taught intermittently a New York program for USF art students. Frequently lecturing on her work, venues have included a panel on narrative painting at the 2007 CAA in NYC; Mount Royal Graduate School at Maryland Institute, Baltimore in 2007; a CAA panel on the influence of East Asian art on contemporary painters in Seattle in 2005; the New York Studio School Lecture Series in 2002; and, earlier, Antioch College, Eastern Illinois University, Yale School of Art, University of Wisconsin/EauClair, Nanjing Normal University, China, and museums, universities and art schools throughout Florida. In 2005-6, she co-curated (with Elisabeth Condon), DRAGON VEINS for USF's Contemporary Art Museum and in 2008 curated DARK POETS at Maryland Institute College of Art’s Decker Gallery.

She has had over 25 solo exhibitions, including Vogt Gallery(NY) in 2012; Regina Rex (2 person in Bushwick, NY) in 2011; New York Studio School in 2005; Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta in 2011, and a 25-year retrospective at the Deland (FL) Museum of Art in 1992. Her paintings have been included in over 70 group exhibitions including the “American Academy of Arts and Letters Annual Purchase Exhibition” in New York, "Transitory Patterns" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Painting Abstraction II” at the New York Studio School, and “Made in Florida”, which traveled internationally. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Ringling Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, FL, and numerous other public and private collections.  A recipient of a regional NEA Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, she also received USF grant support for research in China, Japan and India, and is a MacDowell Fellow.

Mernet divides her time between Jackson Heights, NY, and Tampa FL.  Her work is represented by Johannes Vogt Gallery, NYC.

www.vogtgallery.com