Serena Perrone: A Volcano Pilgrim in Exchange for Fire, on view at the Atlanta Contemporary in 2026 Women to Watch: A Book Arts Revolution, a biennial exhibition of the Georgia Committee and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
National Museum of Women in the Arts - Georgia Committee

Serena Perrone (b. 1979, USA/IT) earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design (2006), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and a dual Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History and French from Southern Illinois University Carbondale (2003). She is a tenured Associate Professor of Fine Art and the Head of the Printmaking department at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her work is included in numerous permanent collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2026, Perrone was selected for the biennial exhibition Georgia Women to Watch: A Book Arts Revolution at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, with acquisition award by the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Idea Capital, South Arts, and a Pre-Tenure Scholarly Support Grant from Georgia State University. She was a nominee for the prestigious Pew Fellowship in Philadelphia in 2017. Residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venice, C.R.E.T.A. Rome, C.R. Ettinger Studio, Ningyo Editions, and the Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking. Perrone is the Founder and Director of OSN (Officina Stamperia del Notaio, est. 2015), an international multidisciplinary artists' residency program in Tusa, Sicily. She has been a member of the artist collectives Ground Floor Contemporary in Birmingham Alabama and Progetto Vicinanze (IT), and her work is represented by Cade Tompkins Projects.

Notable solo exhibitions include: Flatbed Center for Contemporary Print, Austin; University of Wyoming Museum of Art; Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta; Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence; C.R.E.T.A. Rome; Spring/Break Art Show, New York; The Print Center, Philadelphia; Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia; List Gallery, Swarthmore College, Philadelphia; and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. Group exhibitions of note include: the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gallery of Contemporary Fine Arts, Niš, Serbia; Fondazione Oelle Mediterraneo Antico, Catania; INKMiami Art Fair; Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Atlanta; Municipal Gallery of Piraeus, Athens; Progetto Vicinanze Collettivo at Red Lab Gallery, Lecce; Master Drawings New York Art Fair; CICA Museum, Gyeonggi-do, Korea; International Fine Print Dealers’ Association Print Fair, New York; Kyoto International Community House, Japan; Museo Etnografico di Udine; RISD Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Delaware Contemporary; Detroit Institute of Art; David Krut Projects, New York; Visual Arts Center, Austin; Baltimore Museum of Art; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum.

As a dual US/Italian citizen living between the two since 1979, Perrone's practice aims at recognizing and describing symptoms of dislocation through constellations of artworks that reference a near and distant past. Motifs pulled from vernacular architecture and ornamentation are transmuted and re-interpreted into sculptural works, works on paper, and textile to elucidate the mechanisms and residual effects of abandonment and displacement on the landscape and on communities. This becomes a vehicle to confront problems of reflexive and restorative nostalgia and examine their impact on our collective experience of the present. Her research engages the roles of testimony and invention, and recognizes that one may experience multiple genuine realities simultaneously. She weaves narratives that center on contradictory truths against a backdrop whose mystery lies in both its specificity and its obfuscation of location and time. Perrone’s insistence on presenting overlapping views and perspectives aims to evoke incongruous and anachronistic scenarios that reveal the poetics and perils of place and the tenuous bonds we create between identity and landscape.