Ellie Lieber
Ellie Lieber grew up in a rural area in central Illinois, where access to the arts is limited and pursuing a professional artistic career is often viewed as impractical. In her community, the absence of visible pathways into the arts shaped a broader skepticism about creative work as a viable profession. Despite this, her family remained supportive of her ambitions, grounded in the belief that sustained effort and discipline can create opportunities where none previously seemed possible.
Although Lieber did not grow up immersed in the formal art world, creativity was embedded in her upbringing through agricultural labor. Her family worked as farmers, and before relocating to Kansas City to pursue an art degree, she spent years working alongside her mother tending crops, flowers, and livestock. These experiences continue to inform her practice, with much of her work drawing directly from rural life, farming, and the physical demands of agricultural labor. The resourcefulness and problem solving inherent in that environment became an early framework for how she approaches making.
Lieber began working with ceramics in high school during a period when she struggled with self expression and experienced sustained bullying both online and in person. At the time, ceramics offered a physical and emotional outlet when verbal expression felt inaccessible. In retrospect, she recognizes the studio as a critical space for processing those experiences and developing a sense of agency through making.
She earned an associate’s degree in fine arts from Lincoln Land Community College and is currently completing a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the Kansas City Art Institute. Formal education played a significant role in shaping her artistic development, particularly by introducing her to broader artistic communities and modes of engagement. When she transferred from a small, underfunded community college to a nationally recognized ceramics program, the most significant shift was not access to materials or instruction, but the peer community itself. That environment substantially influenced her work ethic, the amount of time she spent in the studio, and the ways she developed and sustained ideas.
Lieber’s practice is characterized by an interest in working across multiple styles, mediums, and genres. While she finds experimentation energizing, she also recognizes its potential to fragment focus. In response, she has recently emphasized sustained attention to a single medium and conceptual framework in order to refine technique and deepen inquiry. Her current body of work centers on a series of narratives related to her mother and her flower farm, using that context as a point of entry into broader questions of labor, value, and visibility.
At its core, Lieber’s work addresses the cultural and political invisibility of female labor, particularly within rural communities. Through her observations of her mother’s work as a farmer, her great aunt’s life as a nun, and her grandmother’s career as a nurse, she became acutely aware of how women’s labor is frequently framed as selfless sacrifice rather than recognized contribution. This labor is often idealized, yet rarely acknowledged in material or political terms. Lieber examines how such expectations of quiet endurance allow systems to continue undervaluing childcare, healthcare, domestic labor, agricultural labor, and reproductive labor.
Through her work, Lieber seeks to offer recognition and respect to women and mothers within her community. Her aim is to affirm the significance of their labor and to challenge the assumption that its value lies in its invisibility.
In navigating external pressures and shifting trends, Lieber grounds her practice in a commitment to truth. She views art as a means of pursuing honest self expression, with the goal of producing work that remains closely tied to lived experience rather than external expectation.
