Baker Artist Portfolios

In everything she undertakes, mixed-media artist Gina Pierleoni brings individual elements together to create a more cohesive and loving whole.  Most of the series she creates are ongoing and have been in process for decades.

Her portrait installations feature real people, gathered together as a community or congregation. Old paintings are reworked into larger configurations for Human Icons that record a transformative moment in the people they depict.

Sewn Figures are constructed from recycled fabrics, found objects and future landfill items.  Cast-offs are lovingly transformed into hand-sewn figures with beaded and painted faces.  Pierleoni’s series of Painting Rag Shirts are what they are: 4 decades worth of saved T-shirt scraps used in the studio, sewn together to create shirts that bears the history of her paintings.  

Arrows, torn from old paintings and to-do lists, are imbued with intentional prayers. These prayers sit together in her maternal immigrant grandmother's sauce pot, the place Pierleoni learned to cook.  Even in the series, Forgetting Memory, her mother’s brain loss inspires ways to piece together new stories with humor and compassion.  Studio detritus also finds a way back into her work, or stands alone as Remnants.

In 2024, Pierleoni was awarded a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Individual Artist Awards include grants from: Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts; the Gottlieb Foundation (emergency grant); three from Maryland State Arts Council.  In 2020, she was acknowledged with an 'Exceptional Achievement as an Adjunct Faculty Member in Arts & Humanities 'from Harford Community College.  Pierleoni was recognized as a ‘Hero in the MICA Community’ in 2011. She earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. 

Solo exhibition venues include: Stevenson University, Stevenson, MD; Creative Alliance, Baltimore; Uferwerk, Werder, Germany; CCBC, Baltimore; Mooney Gallery, New Rochelle, NY; Craig Flinner Gallery, Baltimore; Gallery 10, Washington, DC; School 33 Art Center, Baltimore.  Group exhibition venues include: Towson University, MD; The Star-Spangled Banner Flag House, Baltimore; Courthouse Galleries, Portsmouth, VA; Notre Dame University of Maryland, Baltimore; Fortezza da Basso, Florence, Italy; Angel Orensanz Foundation, NY/NY; Betsy Underground Gallery, Miami Beach, FL; WPA/Corcoran, Washington, DC; Maryland Art Place, Baltimore; Maxwell Fine Arts, Peekskill, NY.  

Gina Pierleoni is an Adjunct Professor at Stevenson University.