Emily Weiner (b. Brooklyn, 1981) is a painter living and working in Nashville, TN. Emily received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (2003) and her MFA in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts (2011). Past exhibitions featuring her paintings include David Lusk Gallery (Nashville, TN); Gerdarsafn Museum (Kopavogur, Iceland); Crush Curatorial (Amagansett, NY); LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University (New York); CULT (San Francisco); Soloway (Brooklyn); and Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia). She has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome (2015); residency co-leader at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Newcastle, Maine (2018); Artist Teacher-Resident at The Cooper Union, New York, NY (2014); artist-in-residence at The Banff Centre, Canada (2012); and resident at Camac Art Center in France (2011). Her work was featured in New American Paintings in 2020.

In my paintings, I have been remixing symbols from the past and present, connecting visual threads that run from antiquity and the Italian Renaissance to craft traditions—to archetypes in folklore, theater, dreams, and nature. My work aims to consider Western imagery through a feminist lens; It opposes the idea that progress in history is a straight arrow, but is rather a winding timeline that overlaps, loops, often omits, and repeats.

These paintings ask: How are representational images shaped, shared, and translated? How do they travel between or outside epochs? What are the narratives that dominate our stories, and how are they reinforced?

Technically, these works—usually oil on linen, sometimes set in ceramic frames or on shelves—rely on intuition, time, and layers of paint.