Lisa Grossman is a painter and printmaker whose work is rooted in an enduring engagement with the landscapes and waterways of Kansas. For more than three decades, she has explored the tallgrass prairie, Flint Hills, and Kansas River through painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and direct observation, developing a body of work that combines close attention to place with an increasingly aerial and expansive understanding of the landscape.
Grossman moved to Kansas City in 1988 to work as an illustrator for Hallmark Cards. Her encounter with the tallgrass prairies of east-central Kansas profoundly redirected her artistic life, and in 1995 she left Hallmark to pursue painting full-time. She received her BFA from the University of Kansas in 1999 and has since established her home and studio in Lawrence.
The Kansas River, or Kaw, has become one of Grossman's most sustained subjects. She has explored the river extensively from its banks, by kayak, and from the air, photographing and studying its entire 173-mile course from Junction City to Kansas City. From above, its bends, oxbows, sandbars, floodplains, and traces of earlier channels become both landscape and abstraction. Grossman translates these forms into paintings and prints in which the river appears simultaneously specific and elemental—a constantly changing system shaped by water, geology, weather, and time.
At Haw Contemporary, Grossman has presented REACH (2014), River Work (2015), Exquisite Solitude (2016), Slow Winding (2017), ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-THREE (2018), A Fluid Line (2019), CURRENT (2021), Rivering (2023), and On The River (2024). Together, these exhibitions constitute an extensive record of her evolving relationship with prairie, river, aerial perspective, environmental change, and the physical experience of moving through the Kansas landscape.
Grossman's work is held in numerous museum collections. The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas holds an extensive group of her work, including the monumental six-panel 86 Bends of the Kaw, Navigating, and more recent works associated with the return of Iⁿ'zhúje'waxóbe, the Sacred Red Rock, to the Kaw Nation. Her work is also in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Mulvane Art Museum, and Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, among others.
An active conservationist, Grossman understands her landscape practice as inseparable from direct experience and stewardship of the places she depicts. She has worked closely with Friends of the Kaw and other environmental and conservation organizations, and her years of paddling, hiking, flying over, and studying the Kansas landscape inform both the imagery and ecological awareness of her work.
Grossman has participated in numerous National Park and wilderness artist residencies. Her honors include a Kansas Arts Commission Mid-Career Fellowship and the City of Lawrence Phoenix Award for artistic achievement. She lives and works in Lawrence, Kansas.
