bio
Molly Springfield makes graphite drawings that use photocopies of printed texts as their source material.
Springfield's projects are usually developed over a period of many years through in-depth research and painstaking labor. Past projects include an interactive archive of marginalia; drawings of books about conceptual art; and her own "translation" of the first chapter of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. One current project considers the process of transcription and the development of modernism, inspired by two sources: a holograph draft of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse and reproductions of Woolf's personal family photo albums. Springfield's work asks how moments within the history of information and reproduction transform experience: through art (19th-century trompe l’oeil, 1960s Conceptual art’s use of the Xerox), literature (practices of translation and transcription), and technology (the digitization of texts, the rise of e-readership).
Springfield is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and was previously a MacDowell Fellow and a participant at Skowhegan. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Critical reviews of Springfield's work have appeared in Artforum, Art Papers, Modern Painters, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Village Voice, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago Tribune. Her work has also been included in books including You Are an Artist (Penguin Books, 2020), The Thing The Book: A Monument to the Book as Object (Chronicle Books, 2014), Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy (Artbook/DAP 2014) and It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers (Siglio Press 2011).
She has had fourteen national and international solo exhibitions, including shows in New York, Washington, DC, San Francisco, Chicago, and Cologne, Germany. Museum exhibitions include the Baltimore Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University; The Drawing Center, New York; Hafnarborg Museum, Iceland; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Portland Museum of Art; and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. She lives and works in Washington, DC, and received her MFA from the University of California at Berkeley.