Allison Green

Allison Green was born in Philadelphia and grew up in a nearby rural suburb. Throughout her childhood, she lived on the periphery of a lush forest, an experience which has greatly impacted the art she is best known for today. Green holds a BA in Studio Art from the University of Maryland with a certificate in Women’s Studies. She also studied at Studio Art Centers International in Florence, Italy, in 1995.

Currently Green resides and works in downtown Jersey City, where she creates large-scale oil paintings intertwining themes from nature, such as the forest and the tree. Her work was recently highlighted in a solo exhibition at Susan Eley Fine Art in New York City. The exhibition, “Deeply Rooted: Arboreal Portraits by Allison Green,” was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with an essay by noted critic Barbara Pollack.

Haunting, foreboding, yet warmly embracing, the forest has captured my imagination since childhood. I grew up spending summer days knee deep in thicket, exploring the woods behind my house, and developing a love and fascination for the diverse canopy of trees—the silent dignity of the massive tree trunks and the wildly exuberant mixing of leaves, twigs, and branches.

Recently, I have combined memories of the mystical forest of my childhood with contemporary studies of trees in a series of large-scale oil paintings called “Arboreal Portraits.” As life experience etches itself on the human body, the indentations, knots and rings of a tree represent how it too has weathered time. Using this metaphor, “Arboreal Portraits” depicts individual trees posed against atypical jewel-toned backgrounds that emphasize the uniqueness of each tree. When viewed together, these trees appear as a family, united by their compositional structure, yet distinctively different from one another.

Playing upon the universal symbol of the family tree, the “Arboreal Portraits” are named after women in my family who have deeply marked my identity. For example, Henrietta is named after my grandmother, originally from Spain, who grew up in Casablanca. Ultimately, she moved to Florida, where she found comfort in palm trees—they reminded her of “home.” It is this very intimate connection to trees—representing both where we come from and who we are—that I seek to illuminate in this work. In “Arboreal Portraits,” I express the powerful and resilient relationship between individual women, both past and present, through the venerable symbol of the family tree.

I am honored to have my work included in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art’s Feminist Art Base - proud to be represented in the legacy of feminist art and thrilled to be amidst contemporary artists who continue to celebrate feminism in their work today.