Annika Earley MFA ’16
Annika Earley makes drawings, paintings, and prints about transformation, in-between states, and the experience of being a woman. She often uses German folktales as reference points in her work. Earley grew up in rural Switzerland but moved to mid-coast Maine in 2000. When she was very young, she used to play in the woods; there she found a small, shingled hut with tiny windows and a locked door. Raised on Grimm stories, Earley was very confident that this must be a witch’s house and proceeded to avoid it at all costs (she had no interest in being baked into a pie). When she returned to Switzerland for the first time after ten years, she discovered that this hut was, in fact, a storage shed belonging to the forestry department of her village. This experience continues to have a profound effect on her work. Earley holds an MFA from Maine College of Art and an M.Phil from College of the Atlantic. She has been a resident at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, ME, Hewnoaks Artist Colony in Lovell, ME, Monson Arts in Monson, ME, and was accepted as a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2020. Her work has been most recently exhibited in a solo exhibition at Nightshade Contemporary in Littleton, New Hampshire. In addition to her visual work, she is also the Managing Director of SPEEDWELL projects, an artist-run space in Portland, Maine.