Ned Bartlett is an artist and educator working in Baltimore, Maryland. His multimedia, interactive artwork focuses on audience participation and explores the discourses of collection and display. He believes that art is created in the interaction between piece and viewer, and he strives to create work that can serve as facilitators for peoples’ positive and engaging experiences with art. A multidisciplinary approach to art-making is essential to his work and research, feeding into both the conceptual and technical aspects of his artwork. The collaboration of art and science is of particular interest to Bartlett; he sees both disciplines as creative pursuits of knowledge and knowledge dissemination, each having the ability to comment on our world from a distinct perspective. The space where these two disciplines meet and collaborate creates a unique opportunity for problem solving and creation for Bartlett. While maintaining a studio art practice, he also works as the Head of High School at an arts-based school in Baltimore and as an instructor at the University of Regina, Canada.
Bartlett earned a MFA from the University of Regina, Canada, and a MSEd from Johns Hopkins University. Bartlett also holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts from American University in Washington D.C. and a post-baccalaureate degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has received recent grant funding from the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts, Creative Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Arts Board, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and the Government of Saskatchewan’s Innovation Scholarship, and numerous graduate studies awards. Bartlett has exhibited installations and public art internationally in Canada, France, and the United States.
Bartlett often creates works of art that question the societal status quo and encourage audience participation. As such, he is currently working on:
Powerful Absurdities, a multi-media installation of touchable, interactive sculptures. This series of sculptures exposes and subverts the hegemony and power dynamics present in ordinary objects by creating absurd and satirical sculptural variations of each commonplace object.
Bee: A Drone of a Different Colour, a multi-media installation exploring our fears, both societal and personal, concerning the future. Themes of [in]security will be explored using the metaphors of automated warfare and dwindling honeybee populations. He also continues to work on an ongoing durational work of art that explores collection, provenance, narrative, and creative technologies.