ABOUT AMY GARTEN

Experiment. Play. Discover. Recover.Amy Garten is an interdisciplinary artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, whose practice is rooted in reuse, repair, and the belief that everyday materials hold quiet beauty. Working with secondhand fabrics, textiles, glass, and plastics, she builds layered compositions that celebrate transformation—where a scrap of cloth or a piece of packaging becomes a carrier of memory, color, and renewed purpose.Garten’s work is guided by intuition and process: she lets the inherent color, transparency, and texture of found materials determine form, proportion, and palette.Her aesthetic leans maximal—dense with color and tactile surfaces—balancing soft fiber structure with flashes of light from translucent elements. Stitching, assemblage, and mixed-media mark-making create a sense of movement and accumulation, inviting viewers to look closely at how materials interact.In addition to her studio practice, Garten volunteers with SMART Art, supporting education and sustainability by making donated art materials available to people of all abilities and encouraging creative expression through reuse.