Carrie Ann Plank is a professional artist and educator. She has taught at the Academy of Art University, in the graduate and undergraduate departments since 2002. Previously she has been a Professor of Fine Arts at the Pennsylvania State University, Xavier University, and the University of New Orleans. Carrie Ann received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking from East Carolina University and her Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the Pennsylvania State University.
She exhibits locally, nationally, and internationally, and is included in private and public collections. Currently, her work can be seen at the Atrium Gallery, Gallery One, and The Chung-san Memorial Gallery at the Taiwan National Museum of Art.
Carrie Ann is a multiple process artist and works mainly in printmaking mediums, painting, mixed media works, and assemblage. Much of her work is autobiographical and deals with personal imagery, emotion, learning, and women’s issues. She feels her work is a way to communicate where words fail. “In articulating my agenda, I’ve come to realize it is an internal need. A need to create a world that one can have control of, and in that world is a safe space to examine the effects of the external world. I’m involved in a personal dialog with personal symbols and personal correlations. It is a way of expressing what cannot be expressed in words. It is the only way I feel I can gain a sense of sincerity This sincerity lies in being truthful to myself- an attempt to begin at the beginning and know myself, come to terms, grow up. It is taking the opportunity to express visually what polite conversation is not designed for. It is the idea of taking out what confounds and terrifies you, examining it, and then putting it into the light and pacifying it by concreting it. My own life experiences, the schooling and the grooming, the disciplines placed upon myself and the mechanisms behind them, and what we take as granted for truth without question, without examination of the origin and provider of said truths - these are what confound me.”
