Christi Birchfield

American, b. 1983

BiographyChristi Birchfield was born in 1983 in Cleveland, Ohio, where she currently lives and works. She received her BFA in printmaking from The Cleveland Institute of Art and her MFA in visual art from Columbia University. Christi has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture , the Ohio/Dresden Exchange at the Grafikwerkstatt in Dresden, Germany and SPACES World Artist Program (SWAP) residency at SPACES Gallery. Christi is the recipient of a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the 2017 Cleveland Art Prize. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally in cities such as New York, San Antonio, Dresden, Germany and Qijiang, China. Notable recent exhibitions include Women to Watch Ohio as well as How to Remain Human at MOCA Cleveland. Indra K. Lacis writes about Christi’s work stating: “This defiantly wounded work, with its pure physicality and the abject absurdity of its brittleness, confounds our processing of its shape and contour with a dose of sly, sad humor, the kind of irony Hesse might have admired.”

Christi Birchfield was an Ellen Johnson Visiting Artist at Oberlin College October 26-28, 2016. During her stay she performed a public lecture, met with students for studio visits, and created an editioned print for the rental collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum.