Renée Stout

Renée Stout (b. 1958) is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Washington, DC. She draws inspiration from current social and political events, the African Diaspora, daily city life, and the spiritual realm. Stout’s objects and paintings often emerge from her decades long research into art history and Hoodoo spiritual traditions that have arisen from African roots through American slavery to the present. Hoodoo practices are vibrant and very extant in parts of the American Southeast and Caribbean. 

Stout’s sculptures, like Device for Stopping the Evil Eye, and Elixir Eleven, are small sculptures created by hand. These fabricated machine-like objects are meant to connect us to the spiritual realm and otherworldly powers. They more broadly represent the hopes and desires that faiths and religions around the globe seek to fill. Universal desires for health, love, survival, and happiness.

Stout’s work has recently been included in the critically acclaimed exhibitions Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art exhibition (Toledo Museum, Speed Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2012-2022),The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse (Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, 2022) and Rising Sun: Artist in an Uncertain America at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2023.

Her work is in the permanent collections of The National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Nasher Museum of Art, The High Museum in Atlanta, The Hirshhorn Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Saint Louis Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston and many more.

Stout was born in Junction City, Kansas, and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. In 2020 she was awarded The Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, and The Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award (2nd Place), and in 2018 the Women’s Caucus for Art, Lifetime Achievement award. She is a recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, the Joan Mitchell Painter and Sculptor’s Grant Award, and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award among others.