Valerie Chaussonnet
Painting, Metal, Sculpture, Fiber
During the studio tour Valerie Chaussonnet will present as many sculptures (mostly steel and bronze) as paintings (mostly watercolors.) Her whole house will be transformed into a studio/gallery, with hundreds of works on display, and Caroline Frommhold, her guest artist, will offer her DandeBee Bakery items for sale.
Chaussonnet is a French-born, Austin-based sculptor and painter. She studied sculpture at the Corcoran Art School in Washington, DC while working as a museum anthropologist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution, a specialist of Siberia and the Arctic, with an emphasis on shamanism, clothing, and women’s art. World cultures and art inform her own artwork to this day. Themes include our attachment to our landscape, to our ancestral, prehistoric and biological origins, and to one another as humans. Her work is mostly joyful, colorful and sometimes whimsical.
Chaussonnet studied blacksmithing and welding at Austin Community College after moving to Texas to raise a family in 1997. Steel is one of her favored mediums, as are fiber and watercolor.
Chaussonnet has participated in about one hundred shows nationally in the last ten years, including two large solo shows in Killeen and in Midland. She has exhibited at Dimension Gallery, MASS Gallery and CoLab in Austin; the former Austin Museum of Art; the Lawndale Art Center and the Art Car Museum in Houston; the Grand Rapids, Michigan Museum of Art; Artspace111 in Fort Worth; James Surls’ Studio, Terra Splendora; the Biblical Arts Museum in Dallas; the San Angelo Sunken Garden Sculpture Park and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts; the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum and the Neill-Cochran House and Museum in Austin; and the Contemporary Art Museum in Plainview, Texas. Her work is in collections nationally, and in Europe and Canada. Chaussonnet hand-wrote and illustrated her own biography, which can be seen on her website along with her work at valeriechaussonnet.com. You can contact her at vchaussonnet@gmail.com.
Art Tour Stop 8: Valerie Chaussonnet Studio / La Petite Provence Austin
