Elaine Pawlowicz

Associate Professor of Drawing & Painting, University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design

Elaine Pawlowicz received her BFA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and her MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with the Chicago Imagists. After earning her degree, she lived and worked in Chicago for 15 years before returning to Texas with her husband and children.

Pawlowicz has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. In 2005, she completed a permanent installation of 12 large-scale paintings commissioned by the City of Chicago for the Oriole Park Library. She was awarded artist residencies in Wyoming, Montana, Newfoundland, Iceland, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, Portugal, Kentucky, California, and Ireland.

She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Texas, home to one of the nation's largest art departments, and received the UNT Distinguished Teaching Award in 2023. Since 2014, Pawlowicz has volunteered each summer as a mentor and studio assistant at Project Onward in Chicago, a nonprofit studio and gallery that supports the creative growth of adult artists with mental illness and developmental disabilities.

Pawlowicz's graphic paintings are populated with tiny figures immersed in expansive neon color fields. Working in a mode of magical realism, she employs both an idiosyncratic perspective and flattened space that blurs the boundaries between the ordinary and the fantastical. Her highly personal narratives are both ambiguous and quietly humorous, exploring themes of spirituality, survival, human behavior, and moral complexity.