Insights: Suspended

Join us for a special evening in the Garden as artist Valérie Chaussonnet talks about her UMLAUF installation, Great Mother.

Great Mother is apart of the UMLAUF's rotating exhibition series, Suspended at the UMLAUF.

Doors open at 6pm.  Panel Discussion at 6:30pm.  Free and open to the public.

An artist for nearly four decades, Valérie Chaussonnet (b.1960, Paris, France) has put her experiences as a woman, mother, and anthropologist into an art form. After graduating from Sorbonne University with a MA and a DEA from Sciences Po in Paris, Chaussonnet traveled from UC Berkeley, where she was a Visiting Scholar, to Laval University in Quebec and the Canadian Arctic. She then spent eleven years at the Smithsonian Institution, researching and curating exhibits on Arctic and Siberian cultures–a specialist of women’s clothing, symbolism, and art, and of shamanism. While at the Smithsonian, she attended night classes at the Corcoran Art School studying sculpture. Chaussonnet moved to Austin in 1997, balancing her life as a mother to two sons and her career as an artist. She has had solo shows in Austin, Killeen, and Midland, and participated in over a hundred shows in the past ten years, including the (former) Austin Museum Of Art; the Grand Rapids Art Museum; the Lawndale Art Center and the Art Car Museum in Houston; the Contemporary Art Museum in Plainview, Texas; the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts; Artspace111 in Fort Worth; the Biblical Arts Museum in Dallas; the Neill-Cochran House Museum, Dimension Gallery, and Women & Their Work Gallery in Austin.