Lopi LaRoe was born in Schenectady, New York in the mid sixties. She is the third and middle child of painter and musician Anne Miller. Her Father, Nelson J. LaRoe died in July of 2001 after a long battle with cancer. He was a high school basketball star and later became a high school teacher. Growing up, Lopi was exposed at a young age to political activism through her Mother's side of the family. Her aunt Mary is a Benedictan Nun who has engaged in many acts of civil disobedience in her life and is currently the director of Emmaus Ministries in Erie Pennsylvania. Some of her earliest memories include being surrounded by cheering hippies at a folk festival when it was announced that Nixon had resigned.

She has lived on both coasts of the US as well as Hawaii, spending 15 years living a semi-nomadic life on the west coast mostly in California and Oregon where she was an activist with Earth First! She has explored many divergent types of dwellings from a Volvo station wagon in Berkley to a geo-desic dome in Santa Cruz as well as intentional community living in the hills of Marin County (Slide Ranch). She has been an independent artist since the 1980’s when she started her own hat company which was her sole means of support for 15 years. In the 1990’s, she began to develop her skills as a performance artist during a weekly art salon in a storefront in Santa Cruz which she had converted into a small theater called “What is Art?” She was the acting director and curator of that space until 2000 when the collective she had formed got evicted so the Landlord could do a “toxic cleanup” of the site.

She moved to NYC in 2001, two days after the World Trade Towers were destroyed. It was during this first year that she discovered that her lifelong love of life drawing was just the tip of the iceberg and she could paint. Her love of painting prompted her to return to academia to get some formal training. It was in the genes, her Mother claimed, and indeed, every pair she owns does now contain paint.

She began showing her work publicly in 2005 and is looking forward to going international with her unique style of neo-post-expressionism in miniature. Her earlier paintings and etchings were semi-autobiographical in nature. Her current work is an exploration of the appropriation of the photojournalistic image translated into paint on thick blocks of wood, adding a dimensionality to the paintings that give them a sculptural element. (read her artist's statement here)

Her photographs reflect a painterly vision of the world. This series of photographs are an exploration of the beauty of everyday life in and around NYC. She is particularly interested in the process of decay and erosion in the macro view of objects.

Lopi LaRoe lives and works out of her apartment in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. She has three cats, just one shy of the requisite 4 which would make her an official crazy cat lady.

To contact Lopi please email her at: ipol@lopilaroe.com

riding the JMZ train to Brooklyn.