AMY REIDEL
Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, Reidel abstractly combines imagery to illuminate the bittersweet conditions of motherhood, family, and sexuality; topics most people experience but are not encouraged to discuss professionally. The innocuous, inherited patterns of Grandma’s scarves and decorative rugs merge together with darling babies and scared caregivers in an absurd representation of home and love.
Reidel’s work results from a cacophonous use of materials, layering, and erasure, which have become her primary language as a progressive mother in the conservative Heartland. Personal and political issues conflate in Reidel’s work and result in aggressive but candy-colored marks reflecting the dualities of fear and joy, rejection and protection. The saturated spectrum is used as a defense mechanism to make magic of this earthly existence.
Reidel is a St. Louis-based artist who has exhibited work nationally since getting her BFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and her MFA at The University of Tennessee. She has been awarded residencies at ACRE (Artists' Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) based out of Chicago, the David and Julia White Artists’ colony in Cd. Colón, Costa Rica and at the Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis. Reidel’s artwork has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum-St. Louis, The Sheldon Concert Hall and Art Galleries, Granite City Art and Design District (G-CADD), Lambert International Airport, Flood Plain Gallery, ACRE projects gallery in Chicago, Fluorescent Gallery in Knoxville, and the Amarillo Museum of Art among others.
Her work has been showcased through media like Young Space, I Like Your Work podcast, Brenda Magazine (UK), St. Louis Public Radio, the PBS program Living St. Louis, the international publication Daily Serving and the Studio Break podcast. Reidel received a Critical Mass Creative Stimulus award in 2016 and the Regional Arts Commission Artist Support Grants in 2014, 2019 and a COVID-19 artist relief grant in 2020.
