WORKS
Artist Statement
Haley Clouser is an artist, curator, and writer whose research and creative practice focuses on the intersections of materiality, history, and identity. Often informed by her curatorial work, her artistic practice straddles sculpture, craft, and painting, employing everyday objects, such as women’s pantyhose, to explore personal and collective experiences, gendered performance, and body politics. Drawing on the sensibilities of mid-century art historical movements, including Minimalism and the Chicago Imagists, Clouser favors restrained interventions and abstracted corporeal forms, rendered through stylized and often abject strategies. Through minimal gestures of cutting, stretching, or stitching, she transforms found materials into suggestive, uncanny shapes that contend with their symbolic histories and social associations. In doing so, her works oscillate both physically and metaphorically between binary oppositions - structure and malleability, delicacy and violence, implication and explicitation, attraction and repulsion, and pristineness and ruin - ultimately revealing our impulse to define the unfamiliar while underscoring that meaning resides in the material itself rather than the body that once inhabited it.
Artist Biography
Haley Clouser is an artist, curator, and writer based in Savannah, GA. She currently serves as the Assistant Curator at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art (SCAD MOA). At SCAD MOA, she has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Raul De Lara: Raíces/Roots (2025), Iván Argote: The Burden of the Invisible (2024), and Tyler Mitchell: Domestic Imaginaries (2023). Previously, she was the Curatorial Fellow at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, where she organized exhibitions such as Rachel Hayes: Transcending Space (2023), Carolina Caycedo: Apparitions/Appariciones (2022), Melvin Edwards: Brighter Days (2022), and an outdoor installation of Rosemary Laing’s Prowse (2022). As a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, she contributed to The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse (2021), curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, and assisted with permanent collection research and gallery rotations.
She earned an MA in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University, after which she was awarded the Samuel H. Kress Interpretive Fellowship (2019–2020) to collaborate on American Land, American People at VMFA. She has held internships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum.
Her independent curatorial projects have garnered significant recognition, including awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (2023) and Andy Warhol Foundation (2022). Her writing has appeared in BURNAWAY, The Boston Art Review, IMPACT Magazine, and other publications. In 2021, she received an Honorable Mention for the Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She has presented research at the University of Oregon’s Contested Memories symposium and the International Council of Museums (ICOM) conference in Barcelona.