Institute193 and DOCUMENT are pleased to invite you to a book signing and release party for Living and Working, a monograph on the work of artist Erin Jane Nelson, on Tuesday, August 25 from 5-7pm at DOCUMENT Chicago.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Living and Working traces ten years of artist Erin Jane Nelson’s evolving practice in and around Atlanta, Georgia. Moving from fabric collages to wall-hanging ceramics to analogue photography using cameras of her own making, Nelson has investigated the relationship between the watery landscapes of the American Southeast and the psychological and political structures of our contemporary world.⁠

Nelson’s practice gently applies pressure to the traditional boundaries of fine art, offering an imaginative, open-ended response to ecological anxiety. She draws upon a lineage of feminist practices, infusing her collaged quilts and amoeba-like ceramics with visual languages indebted to various aesthetics traditionally excluded from fine art—vernacular craft forms of the South, science fiction, and the overtly feminine and personal. Living and Workingmirrors this blurring of boundaries by including candid photographs, diaristic writing, and Nelson’s own fiction alongside critical essays and full-color documentation of her work.⁠

Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, Neenah, WI) lives and works in Santa Fe, NM. In 2011 she received her BFA from The Cooper Union. Recent solo exhibitions include the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL (2026); DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL (2024); Chapter NY, New York, NY (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, GA (2021); and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA (2019). Nelson was included in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and 2021 New Museum Triennial; her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ (2025); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2024); Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA (2023); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2021); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2020); Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands (2020); La Galerie, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec, France (2019); and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2018). Nelson was the recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.