Carrie Schneider, Artist

Innovating Studio Art

Carrie Schneider (CMU 2001) is an artist who works with themes of history, feminism and social commentary through the mediums of photography, film and video.

Before dawn in a quiet art studio, she records her thoughts on the past, the pandemic, artistic inspirations, friends, social media, culture, feelings and whatever else strikes her in the moment. She does so by layering images from smartphone screenshots to create chromogenic prints on photosensitive paper that can only be handled in complete darkness. The resulting composite images, created using a camera she made herself and sometimes splashed with a pink hue of moonlight exposure that creeps in through the night, comprise her current exhibition “Deep Like.”

“Some of the imagery included were images from art history that were formative to me, from friends’ social media feeds or from my own archives that felt very intuitive and immediate,” she says.

In 2023, Carrie will open “Deep Like” as a solo exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. It will include images like “francahiga” (2020), which started with a posting she saw in her social media feed.

“My painter friend Dana DeGiulio photographed her foot on top of this art history textbook with a Da Vinci portrait on the cover as a way to say how fed up she is with having to teach art online,” she says.

The Da Vinci portrait resonated with Carrie because she drew in graphite as a student, and it also appears in several pieces in the “Deep Like” series.

Carrie has had solo exhibitions at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and the Finnish Museum of Photography, among other institutions. She was a participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and is currently the Wolf Chair in Photography at The Cooper Union.

“I feel like I learn from my mentors as much as I learn from my peers, as much as I learn from my students,” Carrie Says. “Thinking about my creative legacy means seeing myself in relation to all of these people who are very important to me. That's something that keeps growing as I age, which is a good thing.”

Story by Elizabeth Speed

Photo: francahiga (pussyfoot), 2020, by Carrie Schneider, unique chromogenic photograph made in camera, approximately 20 x 25 inches. Courtesy the artist and Candice Madey Gallery, New York.