Amy's Artwork
Bridging the gap between fine art and fine craft, Zerner's collage tapestries and art-to-wear have been shown in more the eighty one-woman gallery and museum shows. She has been the recipient of many awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Selected Exhibitions & Awards
Amy Zerner is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist's Fellowship Grant in the Category
of Painting for her fabric collage tapestries. She attended Pratt Institute and makes her home in East Hampton, NY, where she lives with her author/photographer husband, Monte Farber.
Amy has sold her one-of-a-kind jackets, coats and caftans in Bergdorf Goodman for 23 years, where she has her own rack of one-of-a-kind couture creations in the Evening Department. She has also shown at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue stores.
Her tapestries and art couture have been included in the collections of many prominent individuals, with Oprah, Shirley MacLaine, Dame Elizabeth Taylor, Rhianna, Goldie Hawn, Patti LaBelle, Martha Stewart and Michael J. Fox among them. Her work is in the collection of Caswell-Massey and New York City Technical College.
Bridging the gap between fine art and fine craft, Zerner's collage tapestries and art-to-wear have been shown in many one-woman gallery and museum shows. A review in the New York Times said, "Amy Zerner draws on the zodiac, tarot cards, Eastern deities, and classical mythology to create elaborate and highly decorative fabric collages that imply a fundamental unity of spiritual experience".
Amy Zerner's tapestry collages appear throughout the forty-six popular books, meditation kits and oracles she has co-created with her husband, with more than three million copies in print around the world in eighteen languages.
Amy's Artistic Process
Zerner's East Hampton studio is filled with fabric, beads, and an assortment of decorative paraphernalia of every kind, from every place and every decade in the last one hundred years: prints, silks, velvets, trims, laces, sequins, metallic threads. She searches flea markets and antique shops wherever she goes.
Her way of working is as intuitive and mysterious as her end product.
Cutting, sewing, piecing, balancing, placing and replacing, she also paints, dyes, and colors directly, using whatever technique works at the time. In Zerner's unique collage technique, the image is found in the process, built up by bits and pieces, detail by detail. Her textile world is a balance of both art and craft.
With all its ancient references, Amy Zerner's art could only have happened today, when it is not unusual for a print from the Ivory Coast to appear, as did the lace bit from England, the silk from India, the beads from Venice, and on and on in the galaxy of her materials. In Zerner's magical creations there is a mixture of shapes and symbols, gardens, birds, butterflies, snakes, flora and fauna dense and layered, worthy of the jungle of Jung's collective unconscious.
"I have always worked on the floor, and my imagery is not premeditated. It is pretty spontaneous — I don't sketch out before I start a piece. I scatter my materials in heaps in a ring on the floor. I sits down in the center of it all and wait for the first impulse. I may begin a work with the spark of an idea, but more often the works reveal themselves only after they are completed. Then Monte interprets them. Animals, fish, winged creatures, plants, water, mountains, sky are all used symbolically. Water may be a pool of emotion; Air, the realm of idea; Earth, the physical life; Birds and butterflies may signify spirit."
2023
M & M Fine Art, Southampton, NY: RECLAIMED: The Oracles & Archetypes of AMY ZERNER
2021
M & M Fine Art, Southampton, NY: The Enchanted Worlds of Amy Zerner
2020
M & M Fine Art, Southampton, NY: GODDESSES Here & Now - AMY ZERNER & AUDREY FLACK
2019
M & M Fine Art, Southampton, NY: RETROSPECTIVE
2016
UNT ArtSpace Dallas: AN ARTISTIC ALLIANCE: Art and Couture by Amy Zerner from the Collection of Torie Gibralter, North Texas University Fashion Institute
2010
Rubin Museum, NYC: AMY ZERNER COUTURE COLLECTION Exhibition
2007
Gone Local, Amagansett, NY: THE ENCHANTED WORLD OF AMY ZERNER
2007
Gallery of Secrets, Dorset, UK: THE ART COUTURE of AMY ZERNER