Ian Swanson (b. 1983, Southfield, Michigan) is an artist working across painting, sculpture, sound, and collaboration. His practice examines how material and psychological structures continue to organize group and individual experience after the certainties that sustained them have receded, moving between abstraction and figuration, construction and image, individual experience and shared cultural conditions.

Swanson’s practice is rooted in metropolitan Detroit, where he first became involved in underground music and DIY culture. Years spent performing, collaborating, and participating in self-organized cultural spaces established an early relationship between artmaking and constructing the conditions through which it could exist and circulate.

Swanson later studied with artist David Barr at Macomb Community College before transferring to Wayne State University, where he encountered a multigenerational network of artists and educators extending from the Cass Corridor into Detroit’s subsequent experimental cultures. He received his BFA from Wayne State (Detroit, MI) in 2007 and MFA from Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY) in 2013.

This continuity between individual practice and collective production has remained central to Swanson’s work. He has founded and participated in artist-run and collaborative projects including ORG Contemporary, hotelart.us, Sex Objects, and Ego Drift. Across these activities, collaboration and organization function as extensions of an ongoing concern with how formal, social, and psychological structures are built, inhabited, and sustained. He lives and works in New York.