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
2004
Gayle Willson Gallery, Southampton, NY: Amy Zerner’s Spiritual Couture
2001
Mystic Grounds Gallery – Marianne Williamson’s Spiritual Center, Detroit, MI- THE ART OF AMY ZERNER (42 Tapestries)
2000
Franklin Mint Museum, Franklin, PA, ILLUMINATED TAPESTRIES OF AMY ZERNER
1997
Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery, Las Vegas NV, Paradise Found
1997
Charleston Heights Art Center Gallery, Las Vegas NV, Zen ABC
1996
Arlene Bujese Gallery, East Hampton NY, Paradise Found: A Retrospective
1994
Vered Galley, East Hampton NY, Zen ABC
1993
Vered Gallery, East Hampton NY, Queens & Their Robes
1991
Vered Gallery, East Hampton NY, Alchemy: The Art of Amy Zerner
1990
Las Vegas Cultural Center, Las Vegas NV, Amy Zerner: Fabric Collage Painting
1990
Vered Gallery, East Hampton NY, Amy Zerner: The Enchanted Tarot
1989
Vered Gallery, East Hampton NY, Amy Zerner: Materializations
1989
State University of New York at Plattsburgh, Myers Gallery-The Fabric Collage Paintings of Amy Zerner (15 Year Retrospective)
1988
Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton NY, Leidy Gallery, Amy Zerner
1988
Vered Gallery, East Hampton NY, Amy Zerner: Materializations
1987
White Light Gallery, Soho NY, Amy Zerner: Materializations
1987
Vered Gallery, East Hampton NY, Amy Zerner
1986
Vered Gallery, East Hampton NY, Amy Zerner
1985
Marie Pellicone Gallery, New York NY,
1985
Gayle Willson Gallery, Southampton NY, Amy Zerner: Materializations
1985
American Gallery of Textile Art, Gig Harbor WA
1985
First Woman’s Bank, New York NY, Amy Zerner: Fabric Collage Paintings
1985
Gallery 10,Vienna, Austria, Amy Zerner: Fabric Collage Paintings
1984
Art In Fiber Gallery, The Watergate, Washington D.C.
1983
Kaber Gallery, New York NY Images Art Gallery, Briarcliffe NY
1983
Eastern Kentucky University, Giles Gallery, Berea KY
1982
Callenwolde Fine Arts Center, Atlanta GA
1981
Carey-Windsor Gallery, Richmond VA
1980
The Kiva Gallery, Scarsdale, NY, Amy Zerner: Fabric Collage Paintings