Pip Brant, who works in fiber and other materials, and Duane Brant, whose training is in ceramics, metalsmithing, printmaking, sculpture and performance, work independently and collaboratively on socially provocative installations and works in many media.. Both grew up in the west and mid west and say that experiences there have profoundly influenced their work.
Pip Brant has a BFA from University of Montana and a MFA from University of Wyoming. Since 1999, she has been Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, Florida International University, Miami.
Pip is primarily a fiber artist, and usually works on themes regarding social and environmental issues. Her works have been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. A recent body of work has been her Battlefield Re-enactment Series, embroideries that she says are a stage in a process of distancing the memories of battles fought in the 19th century, and the re-enactments are full of suppositions and decomposed histories. The dissolving image combined with almost radio- active colors paints/stitches a story of this dissolving past.
In her Hasenblut Series, (German for rabbit blood), Pip says she is “trying to honor the rabbit’s life with images made with its life-blood. The blood is used as a changing pigment/stain to create images of longing and perhaps a memorial to the animals that lent their life to mine.”
Pip grew up and was educated in five different Indian reservations, mostly Sioux, in the Dakotas and Montana, where her father was a Bureau of Indian Affairs math teacher and later Public Health Director. She states “American Indian Reservations are truly islands that are separated by land-masses that contain different cultures, ways and laws. These places have a disconnection unlike any other place in the United States. When one grows up in the West, one is always close to one of these vestiges of American Manifest Destiny and other bad deals. She describes them as abandoned concentration camps, and says “My summers on a German Immigrant Family farm, in South East North Dakota, also did their best to seek out a recreation of the connections of life and death and absurdity... Growing up there did result in a close relationship with the cycles of life. These include raising my own food. Art production and farming have been strong links in my work.”
Duane Brant has a BA degree in ceramics and metalsmithing from the University of Montana and an MFA in printmaking, sculpture, and performance at the University of Wyoming.
He has lived and worked in Ohio, Montana, Wyoming, and London, England, and since 1999 has been an adjunct teacher at Barry University and Florida International University, in addition to his studio time. He has exhibited nationally, and internationally. In 1993 his collaborative work was awarded a New Forms Regional Initiative program with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Andy Warhol Foundations for Cattle/Text Interaction. In 1997 he was awarded the Wyoming Visual Arts Fellowship. In 1999 he was awarded the Florida Follies purchase award by the Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art. He was awarded Fulbright fellowships to England and Japan in 1996-97 & 98, studying contemporary art, performance art and pedagogy. Since 2002, he has worked with bonsai trees, and designs and creates all the pots for the trees in his collection.
