Marion Belanger
Guilford, Connecticut
Marion Belanger is a lens-based artist who has long been concerned with land use, boundaries, and geology. She has an interest in locations where shifting identities of place are in flux. In her work she often explores and uses archives and found images.
Belanger is the author of Rift/ Fault, (Radius Books, 2016) with a contributed essay by Lucy Lippard, and Everglades: Outside and Within, with an essay by Susan Orlean, (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009). The artist was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her Everglades series in 2002. Garden Study, Ranch House, and Outside Edge was published by Roman Nvmerals in 2016, and River, a handmade artist book was self-published in 2014. She is a honoree of the Hariban Award, a finalist for the Creative Capital Award (both with Ann Burke Daly) was awarded the Urbanautica Institute Award in 2024, was the 2006 Photographer Laureate of Tampa, Florida, was an honoree for the 2016 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography from the Israeli Museum of Art, and a commissioned artist for the Doris Duke initiative Feet to the Fire at Wesleyan University in 2009. Belanger was awarded a $75,000 Percent for Art grant from the State of Connecticut for a collaborative environmental installation in New Haven (with Martha Willette Lewis).
Residencies include the Lost and Found Lab, MacDowell Colony, Everglades National Park, Atlantic Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, and Virginia Center for the Arts, among others. Her work is held in numerous collections including the National Gallery for Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Exhibitions include On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Photography and America’s National Parks, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Eye on the West: Photography and the Contemporary West, Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; From Here to the Horizon: Photographs in Honor of Barry Lopez, Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, NB; On the Arctic Edge: Artists Explore the Far North, Scandinavian House, NYC; Ragusa Foto Festival, Internationale Fototage: Contemporary American Photography, Mannheim, Germany; Northern (L) Attitudes: Norwegian and American Contemporary Art, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY.
Belanger has been honored with grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the Kittredge Foundation at Harvard University, the Artist Resource Trust, and the Puffin Foundation among others.
The artist teaches at both the Hartford Art School and Wesleyan University. Belanger earned a B.F.A. from the College of Art & Design at Alfred University and a M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art where she was the recipient of both the John Ferguson Weir Award and the Schickle-Collingwood Prize.
