Erin Fostel

Erin Fostel creates charcoal drawings that depict stark, urban vignettes, wild, natural landscapes, and her own and others’ private interiors. These works on paper blend abstraction with representation, probing the perceptual and cognitive limits of vision. She frequently integrates feminist themes around personal experience, while subtly evading direct transcription or representation of the body—whether, for example, in intimately scaled images of the bedrooms of women who have recently ended relationships or in monumental renderings on canvas of abandoned possessions at a YWCA shelter in Virginia. More recently, she has been exploring new supports, processes, and ways of working from memory as she refines her complex and virtuosic technique of layering different types of charcoal pigments.

She has exhibited widely across Baltimore and has been included in group exhibitions at the Academy Museum, Easton, MD, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. She was awarded a 2019 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and a 2018 Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Artist Travel Grant. She was an artist in residence at Mass MoCA in 2023. Her drawings have been included in local and international publications as well as in private and institutional collections. In 2014, Fostel earned a BFA in drawing from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she has also served as an adjunct faculty member. Solo exhibitions include the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC (2025); Delaplaine Arts Center, Frederick, MD (2025); C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore (2022); Interloc, Rockland, ME (2022); The Shed, Baltimore (2021); City Hall North Gallery, Baltimore (2020); Katz Gallery, Friends School, Baltimore (2019); York College, York, PA (2018); Terrault Gallery, Baltimore (2017); Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore (2017); and The Creative Alliance, Baltimore (2017).