Hi! I’m Liz.
BIOGRAPHY:
Liz Groeschen is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist using a variety of mediums to focus on gender, women’s health, and the maternal experience in The United States. Originally from Alexandria, Kentucky, she began her art practice by documenting different cultures around the world while teaching English as a Foreign Language in the Czech Republic and South Korea. While teaching in Seoul, she began freelancing (as a writer and photographer) as well as exhibiting her photographic and mixed media artwork (in both Asia and back in The United States). Her photography has been in The Korea Herald, The LA Times, and The Guardian (among others). In 2012, Seoul Selection published a book “Charlie and Liz’s Subway Adventures” featuring her photography from a three-year documentary project examining Seoul neighborhoods.
Upon leaving Korea, she spent 15 months traveling through 30+ countries working on an extensive documentary travel project as a segue out of teaching and into a creative career back in The United States. After nearly ten years of working in Content and Creative Marketing in New York City, she found her way back to her art practice. She is currently exploring the spoken and unspoken expectations of life as a woman and a mother – specifically in Post-Roe America.
Liz, her husband, two children, and one dog can be found in Prospect Park most weekends.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work explores the tension between celebration and collapse — between personal identity and the systems that seek to define, confine, or erase it — particularly around gender, motherhood, and bodily autonomy.
Grounded in lived experience as a woman, mother, and artist, my multidisciplinary practice challenges the expectations placed on women’s bodies, choices, and roles, tracing how those expectations shift across geography, culture, and generations.
Raised in a family of quietly radical women — my grandmother, a chemist in the 1940s who delayed marriage for her career, and my mother, who pursued graduate study while raising four children — I inherited models of ambition and nonconformity. Still, I often felt out of place in my small Kentucky hometown, and even more so later, living abroad in South Korea, where I was a waygook — a foreigner navigating unfamiliar gender norms layered atop my own. That sense of otherness sparked a deeper interrogation into how gender is constructed, performed, and politicized, and became the foundation of a practice committed to questioning the stories we’re told, and the ones we’re not allowed to tell, about femininity, motherhood, and equality.
Working across fiber, collage, photography, painting, and printmaking, I use domestic and found materials—vintage sewing patterns, crayons, hospital-issued mesh underwear and blankets, baker’s cooling racks, metal bedsprings—to trace intersections between gender, labor, capitalism, policy, memory, and control. These everyday objects carry symbolic weight, transforming the personal into protest, and the familiar into something newly charged.
In Crayons Make Me Happy, one of my earliest projects, I melt and splatter crayons collected from the U.S. and around the world to explore creativity across cultures. The project evolved into a meditation on memory, movement, and, eventually, motherhood. Working Mother fuses these encaustic crayon splatters with 1950s-era sewing pattern illustrations to explore the erasure of working mothers — both in corporate life and cultural narratives — rooted in my own experience of losing my job after maternity leave, just months before Roe v. Wade was overturned.
In Heterogeneous, a woven uterus suspended in a crib’s metal bedspring confronts the clinical language of reproductive healthcare and its constraints. Postpartum Underwear features the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale stitched directly into mesh hospital briefs, reclaiming the overlooked garment as a canvas for postpartum truth and a demand for better care. Unsolicited transforms postpartum platitudes into a garland of contradictory advice, embroidered onto hospital blankets cut and sewn into celebratory party pennants.
The Second First 100 Days is a series of 100 hand-painted vulvas — currently being translated into fiber — created in response to the rollback of reproductive rights under authoritarian leadership. Across projects, I center the body as both archive and protest—a site where language, legislation, and lived experience converge. I examine how so-called “soft” materials—thread, fiber, paper—often carry invisible burdens: postpartum grief, bureaucratic coldness, the cultural weight of the word mother. By reworking domestic forms—cribs, banners, blankets—I create space for discomfort, recognition, and dialogue.
These are not just objects; they are questions: What happens when celebration feels like erasure? When care is denied in the name of control? When we’re forced to live a version of ourselves constructed by others?
I create to document and remember. I create to question and demand answers. I create to insist that all women — mothers or not, by choice or by circumstance — deserve equal opportunity, agency, and autonomy.
My work doesn’t ask for permission. It may not always comfort, but I hope it offers recognition — and with it, solidarity. It stands as witness to what we carry, lose, endure, and continue to create in the face of a society — especially here in the United States — that too often legislates against women’s freedom over their lives and bodies
CV:
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024 Salon des Refusés 2024, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition Gallery, New York, New York, USA
2024 2024 Every Woman Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, New York, New York, USA
2023 We’ve Come a Long Way…?, The Art Center Highland Park, Highland Park, IL, USA
2023 MoMA Creativity Lab, Temporary Zine Library, NY, NY, USA
2023 Paper + Post, Boise State University Fine Arts Gallery, Boise, Idaho, USA
2012 The Nude Collection, Gallery Golmok, Seoul, South Korea
2011 Erotic Fantasies, Blind Spot, Seoul, South Korea
2011 Paper at the Edge of Art, Jay Gallery, Seoul, South Korea
2011 The Expat Apartment Project, Laughing Tree Lab, Seoul, South Korea
2011 Foreign, Door Gallery, Seoul, South Korea
2010 The Big Color Dance, Flat Iron Arts Building, Chicago, IL, USA
2010 4th Annual Emerging Artists Exhibition, Morpho Gallery, Chicago, IL, USA
2009 1000 Ghost Bikes Exhibition, Lillstreet Art Center, Chicago, IL, USA
2007 Ghetto Fabulous, The Orange Tree, Seoul, South Korea
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2011 International Artists Community, September Featured Artist, South Korea
PUBLICATIONS
2014 – 2016 B&H Photo.com (Explora consumer blog)
2011 – 2012 Groove Magazine
2011 – 2012 SEOUL Magazine
2010 – 2012 Seoul Sub→urban.com
2011 Dong Ah Ilbo
2011 Korea Herald
2011 Christian Science Monitor
2007 – 2011 SpeakEasy: A Cultural Project
NEW MEDIA
2019 B&H Photo Podcast Guest Host: Milk Factory - A Mother’s Day Chat with Corinne May Botz
WORKSHOPS AND LECTURES
2019 CreativeMornings Field Trip Host, Make Your Own Valentines
2018 B&H Photo OPTIC Main Stage Speaker, Travel Photography and the Self Assignment
AWARDS
2009 Nippon Steel U.S.A. Presidential Award
2003 Loyola University Chicago Mulcahy Scholar
EDUCATION
2017 – 2024 Continuing Education Studies, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2021 Undergraduate Art History Course, Hunter University, New York, NY
2008 – 2009 Post Baccalaureate Studies, Photography, School of the Art Institute Chicago, IL
2005 TEFL Certificate, TEFL Worldwide Prague, Czech Republic
2000 – 2004 Bachelors of Arts, Communication: Film & Media Studies, Minors: Theater, French, Loyola University Chicago, IL
2002 Loyola University Rome Campus, Italy
2001 French Intensive Language Study, University of Provence, France