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 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.
(Shown in photo with crocheted textile made by her grandmother, Antonietta Aloi Mercadante)
Artist Statement: On Painting
There is a moment in painting when thinking stops and something else takes over — less like skill and more like attention without object. My practice is built around the conditions that make it possible: slow accumulation, reconsideration, and the willingness to stay with a surface long after it becomes uncomfortable.
The newest paintings resist hierarchy: no focal point resolves the composition. This refusal of closure aligns my practice with a feminist approach that values process, multiplicity, and vulnerability. It matters to me that a painting stays open.
Each mark is a record of a decision made, then questioned, then left, or sometimes destroyed and started anew. Time and living share the same surface. Light seems to come from within rather than fall upon, color buried and slowly rising.
These are otherworldly dreamscapes, places to slip into to escape the relentless noise of the world pressing in and the feeling of being small inside something vast and indifferent. The work holds both the instability of not knowing and the insistence of continuing anyway. That tension is where the paintings become possible.