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Elri Friedman (University of Oregon) is the recipient of a 2026 Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture.

Elri Friedman works in an expanded painting practice that moves between painting, drawing, and wall-based assemblage. Rooted in a background in Philosophy of Biology, their work approaches abstraction as a site of morphological change, where differentiation and entanglement unfold simultaneously.

Friedman recombines paintings, tape, tarps, and other plastics into abstract compositions rooted in the wound and the lived body, where mending and mark-making become indistinguishable. Their work plays with fluctuation and fixity, often requiring an unstable mode of reading that operates through insinuation, as forms actively negotiate their coherence before you.

They came of age creatively in Seattle’s DIY trans arts community, working as a tattoo artist and community arts organizer within a scene shaped by experimental drag, performance, and techno. These collective, improvisational conditions continue to structure their studio practice, where materials recombine and differentiate, carrying forward an investment in how unfamiliar and unrecognizable forms come into being. Their work is also informed by an interest in the political history of abstraction, particularly its contradictory mobilization as both a site of resistance and a tool of ideological control.