Contact: danielle.c.wyckoff@gmail.com

Bio

Danielle C. Wyckoff is an artist and educator living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has been exhibited or performed internationally including at the China Art Museum, Shanghai, China; the Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen, Denmark; Morlan Gallery at Transylvania University, Lexington, KY; and Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina. She has also presented artist lectures internationally including at the University of Chile, Santiago; The Fine Arts College of Shanghai University, China; Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA; and the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects such as ReThink: I Am A Veteran, an original theatrical work at the Lawrence Art Center in Lawrence, KS and Reproductive Media, an arts-based advocacy initiative that focuses on equity and well-being in arts and educational institutions and that earned an inaugural Equity in Education Fellowship through Steelcase's Social Innovation Lab.

Wyckoff holds a BA in Art and English with minors in Art History and Technical Theatre (1999) and an MA in English (2004) from Georgia College. She earned her MFA in Art: Printmaking (2010) from Ohio University. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She lives with her husband, their child, and two cats on the edge of an orchard that has been cultivated by their neighbors’ family for over 100 years, and combined with the proximity to Lake Michigan and frequent visits to its shores, she finds infinite inspiration, awe, and a sense of responsibility to West Michigan.

Recognizing the minute and infinite connective threads among us, my work addresses our abilities to love and the ways in which that shared capacity both unifies and separates us. We know each other insofar as we know how loving and losing love feels.   

Each project I pursue iterates what it is to love. Furthermore, each project suggests an experience of immersion, a sensation evocative of love, often comparing such a sensation to being in water or drawing from certain properties of the element.  To explore, represent, and further entangle us within this conceptual framework, I create installations, prints, drawings, sculptures, and videos as well as collect stories about love from those willing to share.

My projects acknowledge and elicit the shifting natures of love and water, their beauty and breathlessness, their terror and transience.  My work relishes in the individual experience, but simultaneously reveals that what we think matters most is truly what matters least: The “I” and “you” of “I love you.”