Paula Crown recently launched www.paulacrown.com, a website focusing on her art practice, as well as a showcase for her initiatives in the arts, education, children’s health, clean energy, and environmentally sustainable business practices.

Crown states, "My work is greatly indebted to the pioneering research of Charles Sanders Peirce, the 19th Century American philosopher and mathematician, and specifically his use of sign theory as the primary process of inquiry. I utilize the vocabulary of painting and the inherent logic of picture making to describe how we come to represent and understand multiple perspectives of the landscape. The Africa Series merges analog and digital approaches in order to describe both intuitive and analytic systems. In my most recent work—The Bomber Series—the theme of navigation continues through the use of found images, mapping experiences from a different time and place."

Ms. Crown wanted to be an artist at a young age, and began her art practice in an adult painting studio at age nine. After a successful career in investment banking, Ms. Crown recently revived her early calling to be an artist. She graduated in 2012 with a MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has now shifted to full-time studio practice and, in her words, “relishes coloring outside the lines.” Her work was recently exhibited at the Monya Rowe Gallery in New York City in 2012. Ms. Crown is preparing for an exhibition of her work at the Aspen Institute in the summer of 2013 with the assistance of curator and consultant Chris Byrne.

Driven by her curiosity and the art of the possible, Ms. Crown has also been a driving force behind a host of visionary initiatives that support institutions and communities in both the profit and non-profit sectors.  During the past several years, Ms. Crown has facilitated design and art collaborations with the artist Jaume Plensa (Crown Fountain); landscape architect Mikyoung Kim (Crown Sky Garden);  photographer Walter Niedermayr; the Aspen Ski Company and Aspen Art Museum Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson (Art in Unexpected Places); and Factum Arte founder Adam Lowe. Currently, she is working on a sculpture proposal with Theaster Gates and planning her Chicago-based studio with architect Jeanne Gang. Ms. Crown is also a member of President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and a member of the board of trustees of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she also heads the museum’s Education Committee. 

Originally from Marblehead, Massachusetts, she now lives in Chicago and Aspen. She began a successful career in investment banking as a vice president of real estate finance at Salomon Brothers in New York. She is a principal at Henry Crown and Company in Chicago, a family-owned investment firm.  

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