DEFOREST
Liz DeForest (b. 1993) is an American artist from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Working across video, print, and sculpture, she builds spaces in which perception becomes tactile, where looking is not passive but embodied, unstable, and deeply felt.
Her work takes shape through personal narratives about what it means to exist under observation. Within an oscillation of exposure and concealment, safety and threat, empathy and detachment, a persistent tension underlies the work: the sense that presence is fragile and that connection can dissolve at any moment. Her installations slow perception and inhabit the uneasy space between sensing and understanding.
Personal archives and the natural world become a lexicon for navigating these tensions. Nighttime landscapes, velvet-black forests, tangled branches, and the glimmer of a spiderweb evoke the heightened awareness of moving through uncertainty. The world feels alive at night—tender, dangerous, familiar, and strange. In these environments, perception brushes against the edge of the noumenal, the unknowable reality just beyond sensory comprehension. Her work emerges from this place of vulnerability, from attempting to discern what is happening in the dark and where to place oneself within it.
DeForest received a BFA in Printmaking with a minor in Philosophy from Grand Valley State University in 2015 and recently earned her MFA in Print Media from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work is held in the collections of Grand Valley State University and the University of North Dakota.
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EDUCATION
2026 MFA in Print Media, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI,
2015 BFA in Printmaking, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI, minor in philosophy
COLLECTIONS
University of North Dakota (Grand Forks, ND)
Grand Valley State University (Allendale, MI)
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2025 Untitled, Passageway Gallery (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
2012 Untitled, Lightfast Coffee Bar and Art Collective (Grand Rapids, MI)
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025 Soft Return, Hard Return Gallery (Chicago, IL)
2025 Untitled, Passageway (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
2025 Multiples, Forum Gallery (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
2025 Poster Show, Forum Gallery (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
2025 Anne-xxx, Print Media annex building (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
2024 Winner, Forum Gallery (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
2024 Selling to the Smiths, Frank Lloyd Wright Smith House (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
2024 Untitled, Forum Gallery (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
2024 Untitled, Passageway, Bloomfield Hills, MI
2023 Annual Juried Show, Colonel Eugene E. Myers Art Gallery (Grand Forks, ND)
2017 Annual Faculty and Staff Show, UICA (Grand Rapids, MI)
2011 Barely Forgotten, Avenue for the Arts (Grand Rapids, MI)
2011 Untitled, Avenue for the Arts (Grand Rapids, MI)
RESIDENCIES / FELLOWSHIPS
2026 Directangle Press Residency
2026 Chroma Printmaking Residency
2026 Ruth’s Journey Fellowship
2025 Penland School of Craft Summer Workshop