Marion Belanger photographs the cultural landscape, particularly where geology and the built environment intersect. She was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the contested landscape of the Everglades. Rather than focusing only on the wetlands in the protected National Park, she ventured into the now drained swampland of the historic Everglades, where housing developments, sugarcane fields, and water control structures occupy the landscape. For Rift/ Fault Belanger photographed the two land-based edges of the North American Continental Plate, along the San Andreas Fault in California, and the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland.
The artist earned a M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art where she was the recipient of both the John Ferguson Weir Award and the Schickle-Collingwood Prize, and a B.F.A. from the College of Art & Design at Alfred University. She has been an artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Arts, Everglades National Park, and MASS MoCA. Her work is shown internationally, and her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery for Art, the Library of Congress, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her exhibitions include Photography and America’s National Parks, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Internationale Fototage: Contemporary American Photography, Mannheim, Germany; Northern (L) Attitudes: Norwegian and American Contemporary Art, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York, NY; and Both Sides of the Street: Celebrating the Corcoran’s Photography Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, among others.
She is a current honoree for the 2017 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography. The artist is the author of Everglades: Outside and Within, with an essay by Susan Orlean (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009), and Rift/ Fault, with an essay by Lucy Lippard (Radius Books, 2016). The artist resides in Guilford, Connecticut. She teaches at the Hartford Art School, and in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University.
