Viviane Le Courtois
Viviane Le Courtois was born in Lesneven, France in 1969. She received a Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique from the Ecole Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherches at the Villa Arson, Nice, France in 1992. After extensive travels in Asia and a fellowship from the Korea Foundation, she moved to the US in 1994 and completed an MA in Art History at the University of Denver in 2000. She was awarded the Westword Mastermind in Visual Arts in 2009 and a residency at RedLine from 2008 to 2011. She was a Creative in Residence at the Denver Art Museum in 2016. She has exhibited in France, Ireland, across the US, and at many venues in Colorado including the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, RedLine, the Denver Botanic Gardens, and the Biennial of the Americas. In 2012, she presented her first solo museum exhibition Edible? 22 years of working with food at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. She co-founded Processus, the Institute for Art and Life, a shared space for artists, with Christopher R. Perez in 2014.
Le Courtois's practice is process-based, conceptual, and often participatory. Her installations, performances, sculptures, and prints frequently connect art to everyday life. In 2004, she invented a non-toxic etching process using kombucha. For this new series of etchings, she first grew kombucha cultures in sculptural ceramic vessels to create new shapes and compositions. Continuing to use her own culture, she makes these natural etchings with a combination of time, chance, and patience, ending with the traditional intaglio printmaking techniques of inking and hand wiping.
