Athena LaTocha

Having grown up in Alaska, my understanding of the land was influenced by both the rugged monumentality of the terrain and the impact of the oil and gas industry upon the land. To this day, I feel a natural affinity for places and things that evoke those memories, such as the mountains and deserts of the southwest, and excavation sites and earth-moving equipment found in the industrial landscape.

Athena LaTocha is an artist whose massive works on paper explore the relationship between human-made and natural worlds. She incorporates materials such as ink, lead, iron, earth, and wood, while looking at mark-marking and the displacement of materials caused by industrial equipment and natural events. Informed by her upbringing in the wilderness of Alaska, LaTocha’s process is about being immersed in these environments, while responding to the storied and, at times, traumatic histories that are rooted in place.

LaTocha’s large-scale installation The Remains of Winter (2022) explores the history of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery’s landscape as one of continuous movement and alteration, and invites the viewer to consider the ways these shifts and changes might be mourned and memorialized. In the cemetary's Historic Chapel and outdoors on its Battle Hill, LaTocha’s site-specific sculptures are made from trees that once grew at Green-Wood and have been cloaked in thin sheets of lead. The work embraces the distinctive character of the cemetery’s landscape and the roles that both human and natural forces have played in its transformation. 

LaTocha’s work has been exhibited at: the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Galerie Lelong, New York, NY; MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, New York; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; BRIC House, Brooklyn, NY; and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM. 

LaTocha has been recognized with the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2023), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Pocantico Prize for Visual Artists (2022), the Eitelijorg Museum Contemporary Art Fellowship (2021), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016).

LaTocha received her M.F.A. from Stony Brook University, her B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and completed additional fine arts studies at The Art Students League of New York.