Elisabeth Condon:

Elisabeth Condon grew up in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s. She did not talk until four years old and remains fascinated with nonverbal states of heightened awareness such as painting, travel, daydreams and déjà vu. 

Condon studied art at UCSD and UCLA before earning a BFA in Painting from the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in 1986. Early studies in performance and video influence her current collaborative projects, in which multiple participants create an artwork over time. After receiving an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989, Condon moved to New York in 1992. Inspired by “grand machines” such as Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, she painted doll portraits and larger tableaux throughout the 1990s. 

Travel to Florida refocused Condon’s motif on landscape in 2001. Unable to articulate the environment in Western European pictorial terms, Condon combines Yuan Dynasty painting with the illustrations of Dr. Seuss to portray hybrid spaces shaped equally by travel and imagination. She is now based in Brooklyn, New York and Tampa, Florida, where she is Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of South Florida. 

A frequent traveler, Condon traveled to the Stock 20 International Artist Residency in Taichung, Taiwan in 2004 and 2005 and to Beijing for the Red Gate International Artist Residency in 2005. She participated in the Triangle France residency in 1999 and the Shave International Artist Workshop in Somerset, UK in 1997. 

Her work is featured in individual and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the world and has been reviewed in Arts, the New York Times, the Miami New Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and online publications.  Condon’s current group exhibitions include “Dragon Veins,” a survey of Eastern and Western painters who use East Asian traditions in their work on view at the Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, which she co-curated, “Transparent/Opaque” at the Leubsdorf Gallery at Hunter College, New York and “Re-Structured Reality” at Edge Zones, Miami.

Sample Works:

Sunday (2005)


Smoky Mountain (2005)


Pine Tree (2005)


Beyond the Fifth Ring