TR Ericsson

Since the untimely death of his mother in 2003, TR Ericsson has obsessively constructed an expansive and conceptual mixed-media project investigating the lives of the artist, his family, and the changing cultural landscape that impacted each generation. At the core of his practice is a desire to understand what one can know about another’s suffering and the value of that understanding. Ericsson begins with an archive of inherited photographs and documents, repurposing these artifacts with traditional as well as experimental art materials to develop a series of intertwining narratives centered around the artist’s mother. These intimate vignettes expand into universal declarations on time, love, loss, memory, and addiction.

Ericsson’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, US), the Dallas Museum of Art (US), the Cleveland Museum of Art (US), the Indianapolis Museum of Art (US), and many other prestigious public and private collections. His books and zines can be found in numerous library collections including the Yale University Arts Library (New Haven, US), the Museum of Modern Art Library (New York, US), and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Washington, US). In 2022, he was selected as a finalist of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s sixth triennial Outwin Boochever American Portrait Competition with his work Bride. The accompanying exhibition is traveling the US in 2023/24, showing at the Orlando Museum of Art (Orlando, US), The Ackland Art Museum (Chapel Hill, US), Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts (Springfield, US), and the Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, US). Ericsson lives in Brooklyn, New York and Painsville, Ohio.