About Alissa Van Atta
Alissa Van Atta is an Asheville-based mixed media artist exploring femininity, desire, identity, and the complicated ways women learn to see themselves through culture, memory, and other people.
Working across resin collage, painting, and ceramics, she combines female figures, vintage advertising, text fragments, pattern, and layered surfaces to create work that feels familiar at first—and unsettles that familiarity on a second look. Her practice moves between nostalgia and lived experience, revealing the tension between who women are expected to be and who they become when they begin reclaiming the narrative.
Why I Make This Work
I have always been interested in the distance between the version of womanhood we are shown and the experience of actually living inside it.
Advertising, beauty standards, romance, memory, and the expectations placed on women all promise a certain kind of life: be desirable, be good, be chosen, be enough. My work pulls those promises apart and puts them back together differently.
Vintage imagery and familiar phrases give me a language for that tension. I use them alongside fragmented figures, resin, pattern, and text to explore what happens when nostalgia collides with lived experience—and when a woman begins deciding for herself which parts of the story she wants to keep.
How the Work Comes Together
My process is built around layering, interruption, and revision. I combine resin, acrylic, oil, collage, found imagery, text, pattern, and dimensional elements, allowing each layer to partially conceal or reveal what came before it.
I’m drawn to images that already carry cultural baggage—vintage advertisements, idealized female figures, familiar phrases, decorative patterns—and I cut, obscure, repeat, and reassemble them until their original meaning begins to shift.
That same interest in transformation extends into my ceramic work, where familiar domestic forms such as milk jugs, cartons, and vessels become sculptural objects through altered proportions, unexpected surfaces, and glaze combinations.
Selected Recognition
Alissa Van Atta holds a BFA in Painting and Art History from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions across the Southeast.
Her work has received multiple awards, including 1st Place for 2D at Crossroads Art Center and an ArtExpo Award of Excellence. In 2026, she was featured in 100 Emerging Artists of 2026 by Arts to Hearts Project.
She continues to exhibit through galleries, juried fairs, and independent collections while developing new bodies of work in mixed media and ceramics.
What I’m Making Now
My current work continues to move between mixed media and ceramics, exploring how familiar objects, images, and phrases can hold memory, expectation, humor, and contradiction all at once.
Recent pieces push further into dimensional surfaces, sculptural forms, and the space between something recognizable and something slightly strange. Whether I’m working with a fragmented female figure, a line of text, or an altered vessel, I’m interested in the moment when the familiar stops behaving exactly as expected.
New work is continually evolving in the studio.
See the Work in Person
Work can be found at select galleries and shops in Western North Carolina.
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