New Jersey based artist Lauren Rosenthal McManus is VAPA’s Female Emerging Artist Residency Series resident for fall 2022.  Her work focuses on the relationship between communities and their local watersheds and she draws upon map making, cartography, art history, and ecology to reveal, explore, and re-envision our culture’s complex relationship with fresh water. Lauren Rosenthal McManus’s work is held in several institutional collections, including the Nurture Nature Center, the Charlotte Museum of History, and the Bank of America Collection. She holds a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she was an urban livability fellow.

Her practice is centered on creating large, site- specific, temporary wall drawing murals of regional watersheds using pigments made from rocks and soil collected along their banks.  For her show at GOCA Downtown, she will make a drawing of the Fountain Creek watershed, while also exhibiting prints from her artist book her piece Political / Hydrological: A Watershed Remapping of the Contiguous United States, a folio that re-envision the geo-political boundaries of each of our country’s lower 48 states fifty states by way of their primary watersheds.