©Elizabeth Underwood

As a young girl growing up in one of the poorer suburbs of Detroit, Elizabeth Underwood exhibited an abiding passion for the creative arts. At 12 years old, while studying writing, music, theater, and painting via public school and city-sponsored classes, she was given her first camera to work as her school's newspaper photographer. It wasn't long before the 35mm Pentacon was dismantled and turned into a pinhole camera, used to document a family trip to Niagra Falls. This formative experience, combined with the rough and humbling environment she was raised in, continues to identify Ms. Underwood's aesthetic. A natural performer, she acted the lead in many school plays and operettas and sang with her church choir. And the relationship between her repeated viewings of Diego Rivera’s murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts and being a small child in the city during the riots of 1968 fuels her creative and social agenda to this day.

After the death of her parents when she was 20 years old, Ms. Underwood lived in Chicago, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York, the Blue Mountains, and Athens Georgia. A long-standing affection for trains and a nomadic life was nourished as she pursued self-governed studies in writing and visual art. A casual meeting with poet Robert Kelly at Bard University inspired Ms. Underwood to begin publishing and reading her poetry at public readings on a regular basis. Rainer Marie Rilke, Dostoyevsky, the Black Mountain poets, and Jean Genet all figure strongly as literary influences. She began painting in earnest and her visual art studies included an immersion in the work of Abstract-Expressionist painters Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell, the German Expressionists, the assemblage work of Joseph Cornell, Goya, Frida Kahlo, and regular visits to Marcel Duchamp’s “Etant Donnés”and “Large Glass”at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Stan Brakhage’s avant garde films also played a crucial role in her personal and professional self-actualization.

After meeting a like-minded musician who lived in Detroit, Ms. Underwood returned to Michigan to begin a career of touring the country as the vocalist for an original rock & roll band, releasing two albums for the independent label Nocturnal Records. She began building a large catalogue of drawings and paintings, which culminated in a solo exhibition of her work on found windows and doors. During this time she was strongly affected by the public art of famed Outsider artists Tyree Guyton and his grandfather Sam Mackey and became a devoted advocate of their controversial Heidelberg Projects. While working at her beloved Detroit Institute of Arts she became familiar with the work of Louise Bourgoise and Robert Rauschenberg, both major influences. Her work as a poet and essayist continued and she initiated collective writing projects and performed at open-mic readings. An obsession with daily journal writing that began in her childhood was also galvanized during this phase. And as a floor manager at the Cass Corridor Food Co-op, her dedication to the under-served population of the inner city only intensified.

After nine years in Detroit, Ms. Underwood migrated south to New Orleans where she lived until recently. During her decade there she continued building a solid portfolio as a visual artist. Establishing herself as a unique fine-art photographer she became a favorite of left-of-center musicians to create promotional and album art. She began working seriously as a multi-media installation artist, building process-oriented site-specific "environments" which are documented with photography and diary writing. These installations encompass the building of the piece and its ritualistic destruction, exploring issues of impermanence, beauty, and evolution first-hand. All documentation then exists as a cultural artifact of the event.

Comfortably straddling the worlds of self-taught and academic art, she received full scholarship to attain mentoring from photography Prof. Tom Whitworth, painting Prof. Jim Richard, and contemporary art historian Dr. Isabelle Wallace at the University of New Orleans. Essays and poetry written during her academic career have won many awards and been broadly published. Having received fellowship to study photography in Prague with Keith Carter, she arrived in Europe with every camera broken in transit except for her cheap toy Holga. Her connection with this quirky camera, combined with the nurturance of Mr. Carter, helped solidify the aesthetic agenda that had taken root in her childhood. During this time, her civic work continued as she created and facilitated a support/advocacy group for non-traditional women students at UNO, art workshops for survivors of domestic violence in Louisiana, and site-specific public art actions with indigenous populations in New Orleans and during her travels. Strong experience with Photoshop and digital processes was acquired as a result of 3 years experience as office manager, digital archivist, and graphic artist for the famed jazz photographer Herman Leonard.

In her current installation work, Ms. Underwood utilizes organic and man-made materials: text, rock salt, baler’s twine, empty glass jars, limestone, LED lights, hay, stencils, spray paint, acrylics, pastels, pencils, magic markers, pennies, wood, sugar, polymer, seeds, wire, and dyed water all figure predominantly. In her photography Ms. Underwood works exclusively with toy Holga, homemade pinhole, Polaroid, and lo-fi digital cell-phone cameras. Her printing process ranges from traditional and alternative darkroom methods to a creative exploitation of Photoshop. Utilizing such a wide range of media, she pursues images that communicate the tension between dream and waking life. She is also motivated by a playful desire to inspire relationships between incongruous elements and to dismantle modernist pretensions about art making. A concurrent underlying thesis involves an exploration of the trauma survivor/exile's dissociation, which has been made even more pertinent given the tragic loss of her archive, home, and job in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Ms. Underwood's ongoing commitment to the transmutative powers of the creative process has only been reinforced by this challenging experience.

Having found temporary refuge in Austin Texas as of November 2005, Ms. Underwood was invited to become a member of the IDEA Gallery. She has been creating a new body of work, participating in studio tours, and teaching Photoshop tutorials to individual clients. Her time spent in Austin will be punctuated with participation in a group exhibition at the Dougherty Arts Center in August 2006. Her installation will include the exhibition of artifacts from her flooded home and will culminate with a ritual on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that evacuees who have relocated to Austin will be invited to participate in. Ms. Underwood has also been actively publishing her writing of the past year, including being invited to become a regular columnist in the highly respected arts and literature journal "Purple".

Ms. Underwood was recently awarded fine-art grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the New Orleans Council for the Arts in support of her continued work as a visual artist. In the fall of 2006 she will be returning to New Orleans with the sponsorship of the University of New Orleans’ anthropology department to explore the psychological and aesthetic effects of the region's devastation. Her main project will involve creating impermanent public art in the landscape in places she considers “power points”- redefining, reactivating, and reclaiming this important American city. A corresponding map will be made available to the public so that residents and visitors can participate at their leisure. An ongoing journal documenting the process will be published on this website, along with a downloadable version of the map, in October 2006. Ms. Underwood is also compiling a collection of her journal writing and digital cell-phone photography that will span a year from the date of Hurricane Katrina, to document her experience of exile and her return home. Information regarding this publication, currently titled "Full Circle" ©, will be made available on this website as soon as possible.