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

My practice is grounded in process, material inquiry, and the interplay between interior states and external structures. The newest paintings build layered surfaces through accretion, erasure, and gestural interruption. I’m less interested in arriving at a finished image than in staying with the process as it unfolds, allowing the work to remain open and unresolved.

Rather than depicting a single moment, each painting holds time. The surface records choices made and reconsidered, moments of control alongside moments of hesitation or release. Shifts between warm and cool color reflect a back-and-forth between immersion and grounding, while lines, grids, and web-like structures echo architectural or infrastructural systems I encounter in everyday life.

I’m drawn to the tension between organic movement and imposed order, and to how human-made systems—technological, urban, ideological—shape lived experience in subtle and overt ways. Gestures like dripping, scraping, and staining are ways of unsettling certainty and leaving room for mystery, ambiguity, and hope.

Through acts of wandering, both in daily experience and within these entangled dimensions, my goal is for the work to invite slow looking, asking viewers to navigate layers as they might memory, liminal space, or landscape—nonlinearly and intuitively.