Chris Sollars

|Associate Professor
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Associate Professor

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Chris Sollars is a multidisciplinary artist and musician based in Vermont. He has been an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College since 2024 and has previously taught at Mills College, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, and Stanford University.  Sollars takes to the landscape and streets in order to have immediate interaction with a public audience and to collect society's detritus, trash, and artifacts for sculptures. His process, physical as well as conceptual, collides dissimilar materials to create unexpected and derisory forms, while commenting on larger societal issues. The documentation of these actions through photography, sound, and video, creates the basis for installations that are often absurd and comedic. His work has been exhibited at SFMOMA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; Parisian Laundry; The New Children's Museum, San Diego; Berkeley Art Museum; Creative Time New York; Contemporary Jewish Museum; Manetti Shrem Museum of Art; Southern Exposure; Smack Mellon; Tokyo-San Francisco Art Festival, Tokyo; the Arlanda Stockholm Airport, Sweden. Awards include a MacDowell Fellowship (2022), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013), SF Arts Commission Individual Artist Commission Grant (2013); Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists Grant (2012); San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Grant (2007), and Eureka Fellowship Award (2007). He has been in residence at UCross, Wyoming; Gate 27, Istanbul; Recology, SF; and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito. Sollars's work is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Mills College Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, and Miami Art Museum. From 2001 to 2012, Chris Sollars was the founding director of 667 Shotwell, an experimental project space in his then San Francisco home. Since 2017, Sollars has been integrating sonic and percussive elements into his practice, building instruments from debris and developing music projects as artworks.

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Contact

Christopher.A.Sollars@dartmouth.edu
Visual Arts Center, Room 311
HB 6081

Department(s)

Studio Art

Education

  • BFA Rhode Island School of Design
  • MFA Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School
  • Cart

    Shopping Cart 2013
    Metal, barnacles, oyster shells, sea foam.
    48" x 24" x 48"
     

  • Laurel

    Laurel 2015 

    Gloves and grommets

  • Tree & Turf

    Tree & Turf 2016
    Tree and Turf traverse from the bottom of dried up Lake Oroville Resevoir across the Dam to Oroville the nearest town.
     

  • End Of Cars

    End of Cars 2022
    Door turned into a car and flinstoned down the street.
    End of Cars single from $ollar$ debut album. 

     

  • The Neighbors

    In his first solo exhibition at Dartmouth College, multidisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Studio Art Chris Sollars presents The Neighbors, a new body of work inspired by coexistence and inquiry. Set in rural Vermont, The Neighbors is a multimedia video installation about the non-human inhabitants of the lands around the artist’s home. After over two decades living in San Francisco, California, Sollars moved to Vermont in the fall of 2024. To get to know his new home and neighbors, he has spent the past two years interacting with his surroundings through slow listening and observation, learning them spatially and temporally. This intentional gathering of information has taken the form of diaristic snapshots taken throughout the seasons, field recordings, the collection of discarded nests and materials, and the placement of wildlife cameras in the open woodland edges of his home, which neighbors a land trust, a national forest, and the Appalachian Trail.

  • In his first solo exhibition at Dartmouth College, multidisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Studio Art Chris Sollars presents The Neighbors, a new body of work inspired by coexistence and inquiry. Set in rural Vermont, The Neighbors is a multimedia video installation about the non-human inhabitants of the lands around the artist’s home. After over two decades living in San Francisco, California, Sollars moved to Vermont in the fall of 2024. To get to know his new home and neighbors, he has spent the past two years interacting with his surroundings through slow listening and observation, learning them spatially and temporally. This intentional gathering of information has taken the form of diaristic snapshots taken throughout the seasons, field recordings, the collection of discarded nests and materials, and the placement of wildlife cameras in the open woodland edges of his home, which neighbors a land trust, a national forest, and the Appalachian Trail.

Courses

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