Ian Swanson (b. 1983, Detroit) is an artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, sound, collaborative work, and exhibition-making. Across these forms, he examines how psychological, social, and material structures continue to operate after the convictions that produced them have weakened. His work approaches belief through its residue: habits, symbols, systems of authority, and forms of attention that persist even when their original meanings have become unstable.

Swanson’s paintings are developed through layered and burnished surfaces, frequently using acrylic, pigment, plaster, sand, hardware, and flexible vinyl supports. Images emerge gradually through accumulation, abrasion, and revision rather than from predetermined compositions. Figurative traces, architectural divisions, and repeated material configurations allow abstraction to function as a record of changing perception.

Swanson graduated from Wayne State University in 2007 and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in 2013. Beginning in Detroit in the 2000s, he participated in and initiated artist-run and collaborative projects, later extending this activity through ORG Contemporary, Hotel Art, Sex Objects / objetosexual, and ego drift. These projects form part of a broader practice concerned with context, circulation, collective authorship, and the structures through which artworks are encountered.

He lives and works in New York.