Plants with Personalities: Sketching Alpine Plants

Wennie Huang is a teaching artist living and working in Brooklyn, and Part-Time Associate Teaching Professor at Parsons School of Design. She leads plein air, watercolor, and pastel workshops throughout the New York City area at the 92nds Street Y, Wave Hill, and the Pastel Society of America. She has created mixed media and site-specific installations as well as works on paper through artist residencies at the Center for Book Arts, Sculpture Space, Lower East Side Printshop, Dieu Donne Papermill, and the Ragdale Foundation, and she is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the New School's Innovations in Education Fund, and a permanent art commission through New York City's Percent for Art Program. In 2020, she became a brand ambassador for Royal Talens North America, and her live watercolor and pastel demos appear frequently on social media and in annual international online conventions including Watercolor Live and Pastel Live. In 2022, she received the Presidential Award from the Pastel Society of America where she is a Signature Member. Her recent work consists of works on paper and collaborations exploring relationships between identity and loss, material, landscape and collective memory. As a second-generation Asian American woman, she is interested in the impact of cultural myths on preconceptions about ethnicity and social inheritance; how nature, land, and the urban environment act as symbols of national identity, as well as private markers of time and place. By relocating these myths as visual bodies within local environments, new metaphors, meanings and narratives emerge.