Valerie Chaussonnet
Painting, Sculpture, Metal, Fiber, Ceramics, Watercolor
For the studio tour Valerie Chaussonnet presents as many sculptures (mostly steel, bronze, fiber and ceramics) as paintings (watercolors and oils.) Her whole house, which doubles as her studio and her French language school, gets transformed into a gallery, with hundreds of works on display. This year the guest artists are: Caroline Frommhold, with DandeBee Bakery items for sale; Valentina Vale with jewelry; Ann Armstrong with non-functional art baskets; and Kate Csillagi with sculptures and paintings. We are also presenting video work by Valerie in collaboration with Zoe Berg, and by Ann.
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. She was honored to exhibit a large sculpture at the UMLAUF museum for nine months in 2024, and presented two large solo shows in Killeen and in Midland in recent years. 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 held in collections nationally, in Europe, and in 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
