About Hilary Lorenz

Discovery

Hilary Lorenz is a print media artist based in New Mexico whose practice encompasses printmaking, paper weaving, installation, and site-responsive work grounded in physical exploration, endurance, and the natural world. Working from a print archive spanning more than thirty years, she cuts and weaves linocut, intaglio, silkscreen, cyanotype, and lithography prints with new work made during travel and artist residencies.

Her process begins with immersion: running, hiking, and moving through unfamiliar environments while recording observations through drawing and photography. These experiences become the foundation for prints, installations, and collaborative works. In 2025, she ran 200 miles along the Silk Road in Tajikistan, from the Afghanistan border to China, documenting the expedition for a series of linoleum block prints.

At the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s inaugural Arts Center residency on Governors Island, Lorenz investigated New York Harbor, climate, and water as transportation. At the Kent Cultural Alliance RIVERS residency, she collaborated with scientists and riverkeepers and used Chester River water for suminagashi marbling, then wove the marbled papers into wall pieces. At the TIDES Institute in Maine, she made prints and an artist’s book based on Old Sow, the largest tidal whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere.

During the Chilkoot Trail Artist Residency, awarded by the Yukon Arts Centre, Parks Canada, and the U.S. National Park Service, Lorenz researched Klondike Gold Rush history to create Chillin’ on the Chilkoot Bingo. She hand-silkscreened 200 unique bingo sets, carried them along the historic trail, and invited fellow hikers to gather and play. Participants kept the games.

Lorenz is the founder of the ongoing Moth Migration Project, an international collaborative installation involving participants from 28 countries and more than 20,000 handmade moths. Commissioned in New Mexico in 2017, the project began with Lorenz inviting participants worldwide to create hand-printed moths representing species native to their geographic locations. Through social media, workshops, schools, and community partnerships, it has grown to include thousands of participants who have contributed hand-printed, drawn, and cut-paper moths. The moths form room-sized installations covering walls and ceilings and have traveled from museums and galleries in New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado to exhibitions in Canada and Australia.

A Fulbright Fellow to Taiwan and National Endowment for the Arts awardee, Lorenz has exhibited at the Denver Botanic Gardens, Bundaberg Regional Gallery in Australia, and Hecho Gallery in Santa Fe. Her artwork is held in collections including the Library of Congress, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. She holds an MFA in Printmaking and Intermedia from the University of Iowa and an MS in Exercise Science, Physiology, and Nutrition from Long Island University.

For more than thirty-five years, I have worked in printmaking, installation, and paper weaving, making work grounded in my physical experience of the natural world. My current body of work, "Drifting Toward a Distant Anchor," combines prints and drawings from more than thirty years of my practice with new cyanotypes and suminagashi papers made during artist residencies and travel.

The series developed after I moved from New York City to rural northern New Mexico in 2021. The shift from New York’s waterways to an arid landscape altered my material and sensory points of reference and unsettled my sense of home. Surrounded by decades of my own artwork, I began cutting apart earlier prints and using them as raw material for new paper weavings. Weaving became a way to bring my past and present into the same physical structure.

A single weaving can contain fragments of dozens of prints and drawings made decades apart and in different locations. I cut finished works into strips and interweave them with new prints, cyanotypes, and suminagashi papers. As the strips cross, colors, forms, and portions of images merge, disappear, and reappear. Through weaving, I often discover the next direction of the work rather than deciding it in advance.

During artist residencies, I make cyanotypes and suminagashi papers on site using local water, sunlight, and plants. At the Kent Cultural Alliance in Maryland, I used Chester River water for suminagashi, then wove those papers with linocuts of water imagery made along Passamaquoddy Bay at the TIDES Institute in Maine.

Water has been a constant influence throughout my practice. After three decades along New York’s waterways, its absence became increasingly apparent in the high desert of northern New Mexico. Water appears as both subject and material, from river water used in cyanotypes and suminagashi to waves and waterways carved into linoleum. For "Shipwreck," I constructed a twelve-foot canoe from layers of cotton paper linoleum block printed with moth imagery. In performance, I paddle the canoe onto a lake as the paper absorbs water and begins to break apart, the prints peeling away and floating across the surface like lily pads.

Large-scale installation and public participation are also central to my practice. In 2017, I founded the ongoing Moth Migration Project, inviting artists worldwide to create hand-printed and cut-paper moths representing species from their geographic locations. More than 20,000 moths from artists in 28 countries have become part of room-sized installations.

Across these projects, printmaking records physical experience, preserves material traces of place, and allows me to reorganize those records over time.

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