Evan Boggess

Evan Boggess is a native West Virginia artist working in the state’s Eastern Panhandle. His work has been widely exhibited, with recent solo and group exhibitions in Miami, Baltimore, Chicago, Arlington, Cincinnati, Raleigh, Scranton, and throughout West Virginia.

Boggess earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 2006. While there, he co-founded Test Pattern Art Space in 2005 and served as gallery manager through 2007. He later attended the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), earning his Master of Fine Arts in 2011.

During his first year at MICA, Boggess was selected to represent the school in the NEXT Juried Exhibition at the ARTChicago Fair. He was subsequently nominated by MICA for several prestigious opportunities, including the Dedalus Foundation Fellowship and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. He is also an alumnus of the 2011 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Boggess’s abstract paintings explore the forces that shape metamorphic minerals—pressure, heat, and time—and translate them into a visual language. Pressure emerges as illusory depth, heat through color, and time through the gradual accumulation of paint. Drawing inspiration from the growth patterns of mineral specimens and the processes used to extract them, his layered compositions investigate the natural connection between mineralogy and painting.

That relationship is both conceptual and material: many of the minerals that inspire Boggess’s work are also found among the pigments used to create paint. Through abstraction, he transforms crystalline structures, geological processes, and mineral formations into paintings that explore color, space, depth, and transformation.