Matthew Monk, 2018-19 Season Featured Visual Artist
Matthew Monk is a visual artist, graphic designer, and educator, currently serving as Academic Dean at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. Monk is on the faculty in the MFA in Graphic Design program at VCFA and previously taught for twenty years at Rhode Island School of Design as a tenured full professor in the graphic design department. Monk exhibits his collage and mixed-media works extensively. His work is in collections across the US and abroad. His book design practice has earned numerous awards for clients including The National Gallery of Art, Yale University Press, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Metropolis Books, The Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, and Wellesley College, among others.
In Monk's collage/mixed media work, the purity of ideas collides with the impurity of the physical world. Monk is influenced by all things decayed, worn, eroded, weathered, murky, humble and imperfect – particularly as they engage in dialogue with order, clarity, structure, systems, rationality and logic. He works primarily with discarded and found materials, seeking to uncover meaning in the meaningless and value in the worthless. His work is the result of cumulative layers of additive and subtractive processes including painting, gluing, scraping, sanding, tearing, erasing, correcting and patching. A rich and complex history of each piece is rendered evident through its accretion of these unexpected materials and varied processes.
Monk will be one of the featured artists in the Fall 2018 exhibition Backstory at the Kent Museum. Scrag Mountain Music thanks Matt for allowing us to use his beautiful mixed media work "Little Kraft" in our season materials. We think it goes perfectly with our season!
For more information about Monk's work as a graphic designer and educator, please visit https://www.matthewmonk.net.
In Monk's collage/mixed media work, the purity of ideas collides with the impurity of the physical world. Monk is influenced by all things decayed, worn, eroded, weathered, murky, humble and imperfect – particularly as they engage in dialogue with order, clarity, structure, systems, rationality and logic. He works primarily with discarded and found materials, seeking to uncover meaning in the meaningless and value in the worthless. His work is the result of cumulative layers of additive and subtractive processes including painting, gluing, scraping, sanding, tearing, erasing, correcting and patching. A rich and complex history of each piece is rendered evident through its accretion of these unexpected materials and varied processes.
Monk will be one of the featured artists in the Fall 2018 exhibition Backstory at the Kent Museum. Scrag Mountain Music thanks Matt for allowing us to use his beautiful mixed media work "Little Kraft" in our season materials. We think it goes perfectly with our season!
For more information about Monk's work as a graphic designer and educator, please visit https://www.matthewmonk.net.
If you are a visual artist and would like to have Scrag consider your work for future seasons, we would love to hear from you. Please contact [email protected].