Professional:
M Acuff hails from the Midwest where they received their B.A. in Art from Augustana College, and their M.A. and M.F.A. in Sculpture and Intermedia from The University of Iowa. Acuff’s artistic practice ranges from object making to installation to video and performance, and addresses the tangled web of relations—aesthetic, ecologic, and material—that define the period in human/geologic history now known as the Anthropocene. In recent years Acuff has exhibited their work nationally in group and solo exhibitions across the country at venues such as Carnation Contemporary, 3S Artspace, the Jundt Museum, White Box, The Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Woman Made Gallery, AIR Gallery, and the Attleboro Museum of Art. Acuff has been the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, a Mississippi Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, and has been awarded fellowships at many artist residencies throughout the United States including Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Signal Fire, Djerassi, The Arctic Circle, Jentel, Ragdale, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Acuff is a Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA in the ceded territories of the Walla Walla, Cayuse, and Umatilla people.
Personal:
I am situated by my caring for and being cared for by the Earth. This reciprocal relation makes me parent, offspring, kin, and sacred companion to Özge, Sophie, Fanni and Rüya, several chickens, many songbirds, hummingbirds, raptors, geese, owls, ants, spiders, the sun and moon, crickets, frogs, worms, beetles, trees, bushes, flowers, grasses and stones. I am a maker and a teacher, a student of material and ideas and especially of their synergies and poetries. Later in life (at age 46) I transitioned from a white, queer, able, female body to a stubbly, male-presenting, trans one. Because of this paradox of surfaces, I now move with a kind of double consciousness; my interior seethes still with profound Feminist conviction, rancor and fully-bodied knowledge, while my exterior traffics in raw hegemonic privilege.
