Amy Elkins (American, b. 1979) is a visual artist and educator based in Northern California. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University. She works primarily in photography and installation and has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally, including at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA; South Bend Museum of Art in South Bend IN; MSU Broad Museum in Lansing, MI; Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna; the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, AZ; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; North Carolina Museum of Art and more. Her photographs have been published in American Photo, Conveyor, Dear Dave, EyeMazing, Financial Times, Harpers, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, NY Arts, New York Times, New Yorker, PDN, Real Simple, Stella and Vice among many others. She was recently awarded a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship and Kala Media Arts Fellowship. Past awards include the Aperture Portfolio Prize, Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, Cadogan Award and more. Her work is in permanent collections at The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Newcomb Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Light Work, Syracuse, NY; Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Roanoke, VA; RISD Museum, Providence, RI and more.
Elkins has spent the past fifteen+ years researching, creating and exhibiting work that explores the complexities of gender, race and identity. Elkins’ earlier work, Wallflower (2004-2008), investigates the nuances of gender identity, vulnerability and the female gaze. She later went on to investigate aspects of male identity and athleticism through projects Elegant Violence (2010), where she documented young Ivy League rugby players moments after a game and Danseur (2012), looking to young male ballet dancers’ moments after intensive training. In 2016 Elkins returned to the Wallflower portrait. Though unlike the original series, which aimed the lens at cisgender men almost entirely photographed within her personal space, Wallflower II explores a much broader sense of masculine identity- shot in the personal space of strangers in urban and rural Georgia upon first meeting and found through online calls surrounding ideas of masculinity and gender in the American South. The work aims to confront socially constructed ideas and standards surrounding both gender and masculinity, vulnerability and beauty.
In 2009 Elkins began working on Black is the Day, Black is the Night, which stretched over a span of 8 years. The project explores how memory and notions of self are impacted by isolation and long-term imprisonment. This work was made directly through correspondence with men serving life and death row sentences in some of the most maximum-security prisons in the US. Her interest in examining the carceral state led her to make additional works Parting Words, Golden State, Sunshine State, Holding Pattern and more. In 2019 she was commissioned by Newcomb Museum in New Orleans, LA to create the installation Mother and Child which has been exhibited around the country in the traveling exhibition Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women of Louisiana.
Most recently Elkins' work pivots to include explorations of self as well as her family's deeply rooted and complex history in Southern California as an 8th generation traceably born on Tongva/Gabrielino land in the greater Los Angeles area with the ancestral blood of both colonized and colonizer. Her approach is series-based, steeped in research and oscillates between formal, conceptual and documentary.