Patricia Moss-Vreeland

"Memory is a creative process. The branching, entangled networks, the interlocking pathways of our own making, portray a creative energy at play. I find art can take us beyond ourselves, and then within to a forgotten past, a place, and feelings not remembered or connected to—from there, a new pathway emerges, new possibilities for learning. I find metaphor is related to creativity. Metaphors stretch the way we can see and understand something that is complex or hard to describe. Through my use of metaphor, I find that I come closer to an understanding of the largely interpreted realm of the brain, and the ways in which we can use imagination, our innate creativity, to find connection and make new memory."

Patricia Moss-Vreeland is an artist, poet, author, curator, TEDx speaker, and a thought leader on the relationship between art, memory, learning, and creativity. For three decades she has continued to investigate memory through science, history and language, its social impact, and the role it plays in our lives. Moss-Vreeland works in a range of media, paintings, drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, videos, and artist books, incorporating her poetry at times to suggest the ways that language and memory are intertwined. Moss-Vreeland has written and designed the book, A Place for Memory: Where Art and Science Meet. Her drawings, paintings, and mixed-media works have

Patricia Moss-Vreeland is an artist, poet, author, curator, TEDx speaker, and a thought leader on the relationship between art, memory, learning, and creativity. For three decades she has continued to investigate memory through science, history and language, its social impact, and the role it plays in our lives. Moss-Vreeland works in a range of media, paintings, drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, videos, and artist books, incorporating her poetry at times to suggest the ways that language and memory are intertwined. Moss-Vreeland has written and designed the book, A Place for Memory: Where Art and Science Meet. Her drawings, paintings, and mixed-media works have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, and reside in many permanent collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Chicago Art Institute. Moss-Vreeland was selected to design the Memorial Room for the Holocaust Museum Houston, which received several national awards. She expanded her artistic practice with workshops, collaborative participatory events, to go beyond expressing herself, to find points of connections, to share knowledge, and to elicit and create a new collective memory. 

How do you define creativity?

“The branching — the entangled networks, the interlocking pathways of our own making — portray a creative energy at play. I find this can take us beyond ourselves, and then within to a forgotten past, place, thoughts, and feelings not remembered or connected to—from there, a new pathway emerges, and new possibilities for learning.

I find metaphor is related to creativity. Metaphors stretch the way we can see and understand something that is complex or hard to describe. Through my use of metaphor, I find that I come closer to an understanding of the largely interpreted realm of the brain, and the ways in which we can use imagination, to find connection, and make new memory.”

Biography:

Patricia Moss-Vreeland is an artist, poet, author, curator, TEDx speaker, and a thought leader on the relationship between art, memory, learning, and creativity. For three decades she continues to investigate memory through science, history and language and the role it plays in our lives. Moss-Vreeland works in a range of media, paintings, drawings, prints, mixed media collages, videos, and artist books. She uses a range of images and her poetry at times to suggest the ways that language and memory are intertwined, to arrive at metaphoric compositions that have meaning on many layers.
Moss-Vreeland has an ongoing inquiry about the social impact of memory that connects us to place and the environment, and to emotion, gender, and identity. She asks, How can we remember a place that represents home, work, habitats, and community not our own and form connections, and how do our individual and shared memories shape our identity?

Moss-Vreeland’s works are exhibited both nationally and internationally. She believes in designing and then sharing different forms of knowledge about our place in this world, that includes public participatory events, workshops, and presentations, employed in her exhibitions.