About
My work is an exercise in contradiction. Rooted in the linage of Abstract Expressionism and creating a personal visual vocabulary of Queer Abstraction, the work sits at the intersection of abstraction and representation. I am interested in patina, and the in-between spaces. In the tension between erosion and sediment, between public and private, between the wandering lines and the pooling of pigment. I am interested in excavating intergenerational memory and a liminal beauty of queerness. I approach printmaking and mark-making as temporal experiences. I build images through repetition, pressure, residue, and revision. My research methodology is an an interdisciplinary adventure with many entry points.
To cobble. To fragment. To mark. To press. To change course. To repeat. To remain. To crack. The practice full of play and acts of small rebellion.
Elizabeth Massa is a New Jersey–based visual artist whose practice begins in printmaking and expands through photography, projection, animation, sound, and installation. Working primarily with monotype, she investigates archaeology, material memory, and the layered relationships between landscape, history, and embodied experience. Her work explores how printed marks migrate across media, transforming into moving images and immersive environments that invite new ways of seeing time and place.
Massa holds a B.A. in American Studies from Smith College and a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Photography and Ethics from the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She studied photography and book arts at the Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University, where she was named an Eskenazi Scholar. She studied printmaking and street photography at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. She is also a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City.
A dedicated teaching artist, Massa has worked extensively in community arts education while maintaining an interdisciplinary studio practice. Her teaching is grounded in inquiry-based exploration and the power of play. She is currently an MFA (January ’27) candidate in Visual Arts at Clark University, where her research examines expanded printmaking, archaeological landscapes, and contemporary theories of materiality and memory.
