Biography | Samantha M. Eckert was born in Glen Cove, NY, and raised in Brownsville, VT. Eckert holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT; a Certification in Museum Studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM; and a bachelor’s degree from Vermont College of Norwich University, Montpelier, VT. Eckert maintains a multidisciplinary art practice that fosters ongoing inquiry into interwoven relationships, where material experimentation, personal reflection, political realities, and spiritual questions coexist, collide, and continually shape one another.
Eckert has attended several artist residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; La Macina di San Cresci, Greve, Chianti, Italy; and she was a two-time artist in residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. In 2025, she was awarded a grant from the Vermont Arts Council, received the James Bernard Haggarty Scholarship, and is enrolled in the NYC Crit Club Canopy Program, mentored by Sharon Butler (Two Coats of Paint). Eckert has exhibited in MA, NH, NM, VT, and Italy. She lives in Randolph, VT.
Artist Statement: On Painting | The work lives in a suspended place, a threshold where something is becoming. They feel akin to hovering. For me they are portals, an escape from the scroll and feed and the feeling of being small inside something vast and indifferent.
Self-imposed rules matter to me: consistent beginnings, valuing process and experimentation, risk, and vulnerability. Each mark is a decision made, then questioned, then left alone, or destroyed and started over. Making them is physical, a balance between energy and slowness, reconsidering and staying with a surface long past the point of comfort. The process is a collaboration with materials. The fluidity of poured paint and water calls for dynamic response and attention to color vibration and interaction— melting and merging, and surface texture.
The work holds both the moment and an afterwards. That tension is where the paintings become possible.