annieheckman's photostream

Annie Heckman is a visual artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work explores mortality and afterlife ideologies through diverse media, incorporating sculptural animation installations and works on paper. She has shown her work in numerous spaces, including the New York Studio Gallery; the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training & Research in New York; Cine Capellini in New York; the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Lubbock, Texas; the Elbo Room in Chicago; the Moreau Art Galleries at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana; the South Bend Regional Museum of Art; The Garage in Brooklyn; the International Print Center New York; the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, Massachusetts; the F.U.E.L. Collection in Philadelphia; the Plugged Video Collective in Tuscon; the Congress Center in Balatonfüred, Hungary; and the Central EU Gallery (KIKA) in Budapest, Hungary.

Born in Chicago in 1981, Annie grew up in the nearby suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois. She co-founded the Blue Spider Art Studio on Chicago’s Northwest side, coordinating the educational programs there from 1999 through 2002. She studied painting, sculpture, and printmaking at the University of Illinois at Chicago while coordinating this business, earning her BFA in Studio Art in December of 2002. Following graduation, Annie traveled with Loyola University Chicago’s summer program to study Italian language, literature, and art history in Rome during the summer of 2003.

Annie moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 2004 to study Studio Art at New York University’s Department of Art & Art Professions. There she began making video projects and etchings simultaneously, slowly uniting these practices in what would become her Airline to Heaven animation series. She attended a residency through the Hungarian Multicultural Center in the winter of 2005-6, continuing to develop her animation and setting it to music with work by musicians she encountered after staying in Budapest & Csopak. Annie returned to New York and presented her thesis, Airline to Heaven, Part I, an animation project installed in an environment built out of fabric sculpture, presented alongside a suite of works on paper and writings. She received her MFA in Studio Art in May of 2006, going on to co-direct and teach through the department’s All Access Summer Program.


Annie relocated to Chicago in the fall of 2006, setting up her studio to create large-scale animation installations. Her writing practice has included experimental poetry as well as art writing & editing for exhibition catalogs, and she founded StepSister Press in late 2007 to promote discourse on emerging international art, literature, and critical theory projects. Her collection of texts Airline to Heaven, Part I was released in July 2008, with writings by Terri L. Russ and Matthew Dal Santo. Recent exhibition projects include Six Degrees of Separation in San Francisco and Puppies are Biodegradable at the Philadelphia-based F.U.E.L. Collection. She recently completed a phosphorescent installation project for the exhibition For a Limited Time Only, curated by Olga Stefan at the Art Center in Highland Park, Illinois. Her current educational projects include work as an Artist Guide at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and her drawings are appearing in an upcoming exhibit at the Workshop Gallery in Białystok, Poland. She lives and works in Chicago with her husband, Peter Clark.