Charlotte Saylor is a Chicago-based artist whose practice involves collecting, composing, and painting. She forages for discarded objects such as cardboard or VHS tapes, arranging them in unexpected ways while still allowing for their previous forms to linger. The color, texture, and rhythm of the paint—whether it’s oil, acrylic, casein, or encaustic—recontextualize these objects, framing and holding them with care. 

 

Saylor grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 2019 with a BA in Art Studio. In 2020, she moved to Florence, Italy, for an artist residency at the Santa Reparata International School of Art, where she began experimenting with unconventional painting materials such as wine and olive oil. This experimental approach continued and accelerated in her practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she received her MFA in the Painting and Drawing department in May 2025. Starting this fall, she will be a Teaching Fellow in Painting and Drawing at SAIC. 

 

Her artwork has been exhibited at EXPO Chicago, Secrist Beach Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, Patient Info, Ivory Gate Gallery, Purple Window Gallery, ARC Gallery, .liminal.projects., Art City, Union Street Gallery, Howling Pages, the Dittmar Memorial Gallery at Northwestern University, and SAIC Galleries. She also co-curated Synchronicities with Isaac Armendariz at Ivory Gate Gallery, featuring artwork by Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Ayanah Moor, among others. Saylor’s work is published in Secrist Beach’s Masterclass Exhibition Catalogue, which includes essays by exhibition co-curator Lisa Wainwright and SAIC professor Michelle Grabner.