Deborah Lawrence

Deborah Faye Lawrence creates satirical collages that have been exhibited in one-person shows in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Seattle, et al. She has earned grants from The Creative Capital Foundation, Pollock Krasner Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and Adolph and Shirley Gottlieb Foundation, among others. She teaches on the MFA faculty at Seattle University, and also teaches collage to community groups and public school students. Deborah is the artist who, at Laura Bush’s inadvertent invitation, created a controversial “impeachment” ornament for the 2008 White House Christmas tree. Deborah’s book, Dee Dee Does Utopia (Marquand Books, 2008) is available from Distributed Art Books, and in bookstores.

Deborah received 2014 GAP Award funding to present two affordable five-hour feminist collage workshops called “Eighty Words.” One workshop will be held at Highland Park Improvement Club in West Seattle; another in the Casey Building at Seattle University. The workshop will be open to the public, for adult participants regardless of gender. The workshops will use her list of 80 gender-specific words meaning “bad woman” to inspire fervent discussion among students – female, male, LGBTQ — about language bias.

Deborah received 2007 GAP Award funding for shipping and travel expenses to support an exhibition of the collage series Dee Dee Does Utopia. The work will be shown at the Frieda & Roy Furman Gallery, a non-profit space at Lincoln Center in New York, from June 29-July 31, 2007. The series resulted from a mass email the artist distributed on November 9, 2004 posing the question, “What does Utopia look like to you?” Lawrence received approximately 17,500 words in response, many of them from Seattle residents. “The artworks in the series are visual and verbal renditions of respondents’ descriptions of the sublime, which I’ve integrated with historic and literary texts about utopia.”

Deborah also received GAP Awards in 1995 and 1999, and a 2002 Fellowship from Artist Trust.