Photo by Jason Wallis Photography

Amy Pleasant earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art. She currently works from Birmingham, Alabama. Pleasant’s work has been widely exhibited and reviewed, including solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery in NY, whitespace gallery in Atlanta, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Atlanta Contemporary , CANDYLAND Stockholm, Sweden, Rhodes College, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Auburn University’s School of Liberal Arts.
Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Knoxville Museum of Art, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Wiregrass Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Mobile Museum of Art, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Huntsville Museum of Art, Clifford Chance, and the U.S. Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic.
Pleasant’s numerous awards include an individual artist fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts (2003) and an individual artist grant from the Cultural Alliance of Birmingham (2008). In 2015, Pleasant was a recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painters and Sculptors Award. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art Papers Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, and Art in America, among others.
Her work in a variety of media—including painting, drawing, and sculpture—examines the body and repetitive gesture.