Ana Vizcarra Rankin

Ana Vizcarra Rankin (A.V., pronounced Ay-vee) is a Uruguayan-born artist whose work examines the systems humans use to understand, represent, and locate themselves within the world. Working across painting, installation, sculpture, data visualization, and collaborative practice, Rankin draws from cartography, astronomy, environmental systems, and perceptual science to investigate how visual languages shape our understanding of territory, scale, place, and the physical universe.

Rankin’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is held in museum and institutional collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Brandywine River Museum of Art, Peoria Riverfront Museum, Uruguay Cultural Foundation for the Arts, and the Franklin Furnace Collection at MoMA. Her work has received support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Creative Capital x Skoll, and her international practice has included artist residencies in Ecuador, Italy, and Mexico.

Born in Uruguay and raised across South and North America, Rankin brings a transnational perspective to inherited systems of orientation and representation. Maps function throughout her practice not simply as images of place, but as cultural and political constructions that determine what is centered, named, measured, and made visible. Her work moves between intimate and monumental scales, connecting individual perception to geological time, planetary systems, migration, environmental change, and the vast scales of astronomical observation.

Rankin’s practice extends into curatorial, collaborative, and public forms. She is the founder and director of BDG (BrobDinGnag)International Curatorial Exchange, through which she develops cross-cultural exhibitions and experimental models for circulating contemporary art. BDG’s ongoing Muestra Dislocada/Dislocated brings together an international network of artists and artist-run organizations through an annual video performance program. Its newest initiative, ILM AeroSolar Museum, expands Rankin’s investigations of atmosphere, material systems, and collective action through a large-scale participatory project developed in collaboration with the Cameron Art Museum and Co-Action Lab, with support from UNCW’s Office of High Impact Practices.

Rankin holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a BA in Art History from Temple University. Based in Wilmington, North Carolina, she maintains her studio at Painted Foot Art Lab and teaches in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her current research considers light, water, atmosphere, darkness, and the often-invisible systems connecting human experience to ecological and cosmic scales.