Noelle Mason

Associate Professor, Sculpture & Extended Media
Phone: (813) 974-2360
Email: nmason@usf.edu
Office: FAH 258

Website: http://www.noellemason.com

Noelle Mason jumps out of airplanes. Her practice incorporates photography, craft, and performance to expose how individual responses to collective trauma are shaped. Mason appropriates the visual mediation left over after afflictive events such as the Rodney King beating or undocumented U.S./Mexico border crossings in order to draw awareness to systems of violence and power. In the installation titled “Love Letters/White Flag: The Book of God” (2009-2016), Mason hand embroidered Eric Harris’ journal entries leading up to the Columbine High School massacre on vintage handkerchiefs.

 Mason was awarded both the 2017 Southern Prize Fellowship in Atlanta and the 2016 First Place Florida Prize in Contemporary Art. She has also been the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, a Jerome Fellowship, and the Illinois Arts Council International Artist Grant. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in a variety of non-traditional art spaces, galleries, and institutions, including the National Museum of Mexican Art and the Smithsonian Institute. Mason is the director and curator of Parallelogram, an alternative exhibition space in Tampa. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Franconia Sculpture Park and at 1a Space in Hong Kong. She holds a BA in both Theatre and Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.