Allison Wade is a visual artist and educator working primarily in sculpture. Her practice is material-based, intuitive, and formally focused. She combines ceramics, textiles, wood, and metal into unexpected, often tenuous arrangements that explore the intersection of flatness and form. Wade’s process, which she likens to syntax, is closely aligned with writing. Deploying an idiosyncratic visual language, she explores the structural and formal contingencies of her materials and sculptures, grouping them into words, sentences, and paragraphs that function both as distinct elements and parts of a whole.

Wade received an MFA from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BA in English literature from Stanford University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. She lives and works in Chicago, where she is a Lecturer in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Devening Projects.