About

Scott Gleeson is a conceptual artist specializing in experimental painting and curatorial initiatives examining themes of memory, space, and power. A contextualist approach to painting enables the artist to negotiate art’s social and mnemonic functions within established disciplinary and institutional frameworks, resulting in timely and responsive projects with disruptive potential. Central to the artist’s process is a strategy of bricolage that synthesizes diverse references from art history and visual culture with methods of institutional critique, direct observation, and speculative worldmaking. Gleeson advocates painting as a mode of resistance, favoring an abstract visual language that expands each image’s capacity for complexity, ambiguity, and signification.

The artist has been recognized with grants, scholarships, and fellowships from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Meadows School of the Arts, the Doolin/Zelle/Jones and Rigsby funds also of the Meadows School, Oregon Humanities, and the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition. Gleeson holds a BA in art history from Colorado College and an MA in art history from Southern Methodist University where he specialized in Renaissance sculpture and British social practices, respectively. Gleeson’s work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at Eastfield College’s Gallery 219 and SMU’s Hawn Gallery. His paintings have been featured in New American Paintings and the 2010 Hunting Art Prize Gala and are held in private collections throughout the US and UK. He is the founding editor of Peripheral Vision, a journal of long-form criticism covering mid-career American artists that ran from 2016-19. Gleeson will pursue independent research as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome for the 2024-25 academic year.