Laurie Hogin

Chicago artist Laurie Hogin has exhibited with Koplin Del Rio since 1998. Hogin received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Her work is exhibited regularly across the country and is in numerous private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, the Illinois State Museum, The United States Federal Reserve, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Brauer Museum, Valparaiso, IN, the Racine Art Museum, WI, among many others. She is currently Professor with Tenure in the Painting and Sculpture Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Hogin’s allegorical animal species, especially bunnies, monkeys, and birds, continue to figure prominently; all are symbols of common projections of “nature”, a sort of cultural shorthand. Bunnies are creatures whose being functions as a symbolic vessel for human fantasies about cuteness and the pastoral. Monkeys, as in the history of art generally, represent humans’ “animal nature”, tendencies we share with primate cousins as a result of evolutionary networks of being, and birds engage in social behaviors often compared to that of humans.