Bio

Holly Cahill is a Chicago-based visual artist (b.1976) working between painting, fibers, sculpture, and collage. Her process-oriented, sculptural abstractions gather impressions of natural phenomena that explore themes of biodiversity, transformation, and sensorial experience. Considering fabric’s foundational role in painting, she works with materials expansively combining strategies drawn from painting alongside various textile traditions such as quilting, shibori, and garment construction. As curator Dominic Molon remarks in New American Paintings, Cahill emphasizes “the medium’s fundamentally cloth based nature” to “question where a painting, a rug, a tapestry, and other textile based objects begin and end.”

Cahill received her MFA from the University of Cincinnati (2004) and a BFA from Syracuse University (1998). Most recently, her work has been included in exhibitions at Secrist|Beach, Hyde Park Art Center, 65GRAND, Epiphany Center for the Arts (Chicago, IL), Phillip J. Steele Gallery at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (Lakewood, CO), Eckert Art Gallery at Millersville University (Millersville, PA), and nationalmuseum (Berlin, Germany). She has been awarded residencies throughout the United States and Canada at Ragdale (Lake Forest, IL), Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Banff Centre (Banff, Canada), and Ox-Bow (Saugatuck, MI), among others. Her work has been featured in several publications including LUXE Interiors + Design, New American Paintings, Chicago Tribune, and Inside\Within.

She is a former director and current member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago: an artist-run, non-profit, cooperative exhibition space. Cahill has curated exhibitions, often in collaboration with others, at venues such as Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Weinberg Newton Gallery, Mana Contemporary, The Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College (Chicago, IL), Satellite Art Show (Miami, FL), and Scotty Enterprises (Berlin, Germany).