An Ohio native born in 1970, Laura Owens has become one of Los Angeles’ preeminent artists.  She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.  In 1993 The Museum of Contemporary Art at California Plaza honored her with her first major monographic survey of painted works. Owens has since emerged as one of the most prominent L.A. artists of the last few decades.

Major influences on her work include a wide range of sources, from English embroidery and Chinese and Japanese landscape painting to her own photography.  She has also been strongly influenced by the likes of Mary Heilmann and Helen Frankenthaler. Owens describes her work as, “very specifically American and [having] a lot to do with where I come from.  I suppose it’s a straightforward, Midwestern, no-bones-about-it sensibility and a certain sense of humor.”  Critics have described her work as enigmatic, energetic, childlike and sophisticated, infused with a deep understanding of art history and contemporary discourses.