Chris Garofalo (b. Springfield, Illinois) creates ceramic sculptures that draw inspiration from plant and animal forms. Following extensive experience with printmaking and graphic design, Garofalo was introduced to ceramics. An avid gardener, she took quickly to the medium, finding the two things very similar, especially in smell (the clay and the dirt) and the condition in which both activities leave her hands. Inspired by watching the way plants grow, Chris Garofalo attends to the principle properties of development, but disregards traditional behavioral, environmental, genetic, and mating patterns to reimagine an evolutionary history of our planet filled with forms that are at once recognizable and unidentifiable.  

Garofalo earned a BFA from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. She has exhibited her ceramic sculptures since 1991 holding exhibitions at galleries and institutions internationally including Bridge Projects Gallery, LA; Bureau Gallery, New York; R & Company, New York; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois; Mathew Marks Gallery, New York; Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon; Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburg; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco; Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago; and Foundazione Mazzullo, Taormino, Sicily. In 2007, she received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painter and Sculptor Award. Chris Garofalo has lived and worked in Chicago since 1980.