FONTAINE DUNN is an artist and writer currently living in upstate New York. Ms. Dunn received her BFA from Tulane University, and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon.  Dunn is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has exhibited her work in New York City, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Hudson and numerous other venues.

 Fontaine Dunn has taught painting at Sarah Lawrence College, Princeton University and The Nova Scotia College of Art, and as a visiting artist In Ohio and North Carolina. Before embarking on her teaching career, Dunn worked as an arts administrator at the Dia Foundation in New York City, and as personal/curatorial assistant to the artist Frank Stella. 

In addition to her art, Dunn has helped immigrants learn English as a Second Language, through the use of visual games, cartoons and graphic organizers. She illustrated the book,

Behind the Camera: American Women Photographers Who Shaped How We See the World by Maria Ausherman and she collaborated with Ms. Ausherman on the podcast, Absolutely Amazing American Women Artists presented on WGXC Radio, Hudson, NY. She has also interviewed local artists on WGXC. 

Artist's Statement

What does it mean to represent visually?

What is "representational" art? For example, I can take a photograph of a bird (or do a water color or paint it), and say I have "represented" it. But have I really? I may have captured light and shadow, color and essential form. But in a sense these are all externals. After all, a living creature is both the sum total of its atoms, molecules, DNA, organs, muscles, sinew and neural pathways, and, at the same time, an irreducible energy or life force. Thus, I have only communicated some aspects of its being in a particular moment.

 In my art I hope to reconcile seen and unseen, known and unknown, aspects of reality. On the surface, my paintings may appear to be somewhat simple arrangements of colored rectangles or circles, which (I hope) are pleasing to the eye. Or they may contain snippets of visual detritus which derive from a storehouse of cultural signifiers and universal glyphs that evoke memories, sensations and emotions. In this sense, I attempt to represent "reality" without dwelling on reportage. I imagine that I am communicating certain truths by interposing impressions from the past, the present and possibly the future. I like to think I am speaking, through the visual languages of form, color, shape, light and dark, of a world
beyond visual knowing.

To quote Dorothea Rockburne, "When I begin to work, I don't think about geometry or manipulating materials. What I try to do is have a flow from my interior self into the work."