samantha m. eckert

Biography

Samantha M. Eckert was born in Glen Cove, NY, and raised in Brownsville, VT. Eckert earned her MFA in Visual Art in 2015 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 Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass, CO; 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.

(Shown in photo with crocheted textile made by her grandmother, Antonietta Aloi Mercadante)

Artist Statement

Samantha Mercadante Eckert’s practice is grounded in process, material inquiry, and the interplay between interior states and external structures. Her paintings build layered surfaces through accretion, erasure, and gestural interruption, situating her work within contemporary abstraction that privileges becoming over resolution. Rather than presenting a singular image, her work operates as a field of temporal activity—evidence of decisions made, resisted, and revised over time.
The chromatic range moves between cool, aqueous tones and earthen warmth, suggesting a dialogue between immersion and grounding, while linear scaffolds and grid-like traces recall architectural or infrastructural systems. Tensions between organic flow and imposed order reflect Eckert’s interest in how human systems—technological, urban, and ideological—intersect with lived experience.
Material gestures such as dripping, scraping, and staining function as deliberate strategies that destabilize fixed meaning. The surface resists hierarchy: no single mark claims authority, and no focal point resolves the composition. This refusal of closure aligns the artist with feminist and post-minimal approaches that value multiplicity, vulnerability, and process as epistemological tools rather than stylistic effects.
Eckert’s paintings invite slow looking, asking viewers to navigate layers as they might memory, liminal space, or landscape—nonlinearly and intuitively. Her work affirms abstraction as contemplative inquiry, responsive to contemporary conditions while rooted in the intelligence of making.