Lori K. Gordon

Lori K. Gordon was born in the Northern Plains, and spent her childhood on the prairies of eastern South Dakota. As a teen, she began moving west and then south, living for years in the Black Hills of South Dakota and the high desert of Arizona. Along the way, she picked up a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in religious studies, all the while pursuing her love of art. She has traveled extensively in the United States, painting and drawing her way from the west to east coasts, and from Canada to Mexico. In 1991 she made the Mississippi Gulf Coast her home.

Largely self taught, Gordon works in many medias including graphite, fabric, acrylic, handmade paper and polymer clay. She is especially fond of collage and assemblage work, and introduced her first mixed media series in 2001. Two years later, one of her pieces was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution for inclusion into their permanent collection. “Labat: A Creole Legacy” is an eight by ten foot fabric collage which tells the story, in images and text, of the life of a Bay St. Louis Creole woman who died in 2002 at the age of 104.

In 2003 Gordon began capturing the local landscapes of her beloved Mississippi Gulf Coast in acrylic, and continued that work until Hurricane Katrina upended her life on August 29, 2005. With her home, studio and all of her supplies washed away by the 35 foot storm surge and 150 mile per hour winds which obliterated her community, Gordon returned to work using the only materials which were available to her. Five weeks after the event, Gordon began collecting rubble and transforming it into works of art.

“The Katrina Collection” is the name she has given to this new series of mixed media collages and assemblages. The series first garnered national attention when MSNBC.COM featured the work in their series “Rising From Ruin.” Since then, Gordon has exhibited The Katrina Collection in venues around the nation. Upcoming exhibits of Gordon’s work as well as workshops on her techniques are scheduled in several states including Minnesota, California, Washington, and Arkansas.

Gordon also writes for Art Gulf Coast: a Quarterly Review of Art along the Gulf Coast, and in the spring of 2005 she co-founded Coastal Community Watch, an internet-based activist organization working to preserve the environmental quality and character of her Gulf Coast home. For more information about the artist and her work, please visit her sites on the world wide web at http://thekatrinacollectionbylorikgordon.blogspot.com or at http://lorikgordon.blogspot.com where her curriculum vitae may be accessed. To see a slideshow and listen to an interview with the artist, log on to http://risingfromruin.msnbc.com. Gordon may also be contacted at lkgordon@bellsouth.net, or by calling 228.466.9253 or 228.342.0877.