Artist Biography
Geoffrey Detrani is a visual artist and writer who currently lives and works in New Haven, CT. Detrani uses imagery that explores the hypothetical intersections between the natural world and the manmade environment. Representing a natural world that is spun from a conflation of imagination and ideology, or a symbolic rendering, rather than one that mimics our visual experience of it. His pictures suggest landscapes captured in a state of flux, landscapes on the cusp or in the throes of explosive generation or devolution, they are geographies of entropy and zero-sum gain.
“I am interested in the tenuous and temporary fit with which the things we have built have accommodated themselves to the fecund and resurgent and violent forces of the natural world around them.”
Detrani’s work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Los Angles, Boston, and South Korea to name a few. His artist books are part of the collections in the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Detrani’s artwork can be found in permanent collections around the world including the New Britain Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Baltimore Contemporary Museum, Transportation Security Administration, The Schenectady Museum, Manhattan Graphics Center, The Progressive Corp., Pomona Capital, Inc., and Poets House to name a few. From 1999 – 2000 Detrani was an artist in residence at the former World Trade Center with a studio on the 91st. Floor. He is the recipient of grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Bronx Museum, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the State University of New York Foundation, the Center for Book Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Manhattan Graphics Center, the Connecticut Artist’s Fellowship Award, and the Center for Book Arts. Detrani’s poetry has appeared in Aufgabe, Crowd, New Orleans Review, New Delta Review, Massachusetts Review, First Intensity, Epiphany, 14 Hills, Words, Parthenon West Review, the Columbia Review of Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Red China, Ugly Duckling Press 6×6, Fence and Fence Anthology, Canary, Tarpaulin Sky, Danse Macabre, Fringe Poetry, Drunken Boat, Eleven Bulls, and Action, among other publications.