Lisa Bulawsky is a St. Louis-based visual artist whose work is driven by questions about history, memory, and the continuum of time – what marks we leave behind and what marks are left on us. A vital aspect of her work comes from the inherent physical and metaphorical qualities of printmaking – its unique mark impressed in a surface and its potential to act as a bridge to the public sphere.
Bulawsky is the recipient of an Artistic Innovations Grant from the Mid-America Arts Alliance in 2020 and a Puffin Foundation grant in 2018 as co-founder of the Fifty-Fifty art collective. Fifty-Fifty's project, Portable Memories in Rising Seas, was presented at Pública Espacio Cultural, San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2025 and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco in 2021 among other venues throughout the U.S. She is the professor of Studio Art and director of Island Press at Washington University in St. Louis. Recent exhibitions include the Miami Dade Public Library, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum.
While at MacDowell, Bulawsky continued work on a new series of works on paper with printmaking and collage that will be shown in a 2026 exhibition at the Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO. This project brings deep time (the geological and cosmological) together with the long durée (the cultural and Anthropocentric) using the printed mark to address the marks we leave on the world as artists and as a species.
Portrait by Arno Goetz
