Biography

Marc Swanson (born 1969, New Britain, Connecticut) is an American sculptor and installation artist who lives and works in Catskill, New York. His sculptures, assemblages, and installations draw on personal history and queer identity, setting craft and glamour against themes of memory, loss, and ecological change. Working across sculpture, drawing, video, photography, and installation, he uses materials including wood, glass, fabric, chain, mirror, and naturally shed antlers.

Raised in a New England hunting family, Swanson moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, where he became involved in the city's gay counterculture and club scene; his early crystal-covered deer head sculptures grew out of the tension between those two worlds. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000 and received his MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2004. His first museum survey, Hurry on Sundown, was presented at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in 2008, followed by solo museum exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the New Britain Museum of American Art, and the New Museum. His largest exhibition to date, A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco, was presented at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts (2022-2023), with a companion exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York (2022); the two-venue installation linked the losses of the AIDS crisis, which Swanson lived through as a young gay man, with the ongoing losses of climate change.

Swanson's exhibition Death Is Expensive is on view at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine, from May 23 to September 13, 2026. The exhibition brings together new work and a selection of works from the past twenty years, including wall-mounted assemblages in wooden boxes that often appear as modest reliquaries, and paintings housed in sculpted and painted frames; its title is drawn from a line spoken by Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire. Swanson serves on the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is represented by Baldwin Gallery in Aspen and Inman Gallery, Houston.