About Lizzie Wortham
Originally from Minnesota, Wortham works out of her woodland studio in Clam Falls, Wisconsin. Her work, which has appeared in both solo and group shows, has received regional and national recognition from organizations such as the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the North American Graduate Art Survey.
Wortham’s series “The Currency of Beauty," exhibited at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota", is her third collection to focus on abstract young women as they discover-and create--their own identities. Each painting's inspiration is a selfie posted on social media. Curator Erica Rassmusen muses, “Conceptually, her work questions western standards of beauty, binary stereotypes, and self-perception in the digital age. Wortham's paintings ask us to consider whether these images simply address a young woman’s sense of vanity, or whether the young women portrayed are agents of change.”
Wortham's previous body of work was funded by a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant. The “Like a Girl" paintings were rendered in oil, and employ a combination of washes, blocks of color, layered brushwork, and thick impasto applied with a palette knife. The images play with the rules of pictorial space while evoking nostalgia, dreams, and memories of childhood and adolescence.
Wortham began painting during her undergraduate years at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she was a student of the late Jerry Rudquist. After completing her bachelor's degree, Wortham worked as a designer, but continued to paint—often, with her children and their friends as subjects. In 2010, she entered the Painting and Drawing MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studying under T. L. Solien. Upon graduating in 2013, Wortham moved to Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative in St. Paul, MN. While living in the Twin Cities she got involved in a number of community arts efforts including serving as the painting and drawing judge for the Minnesota State Fair art exhibition in 2017 and participating in the St. Paul Art Crawl for a number of years, winning both the poster contest and media contest in 2017.
Wortham’s work is part of numerous private collections and has been shown at the Catherine C. Murphy Gallery at St. Catherine University, Gordon Park’s Gallery at Metropolitan State University, the Duluth Art Institute, Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Keep Contemporary Gallery in Santa Fe, and Saatchi's Other Art Fair in Chicago.