Elisa Decker is a visual artist who curates, writes, and teaches. Her formal training is in drawing and painting, and she graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1974. A self-taught photographer, she started out as a landscape painter but also works in other mediums such as frottage, drawing, collage, and found object assemblage. She transitioned to photography as a side effect of documenting her work; it became her primary focus during a Camargo Foundation residency in 2005 when she was hiking through the cliffs of southern France. For several years she wrote reviews for Art in America, and occasionally curates large group shows. The catalog for her most recent curatorial project, the Sympathetic Magic exhibition, came out in 2019. In addition to everything else, she teaches a writing-intensive drawing course at BMCC.
“Elfie is Elisa Decker’s alter ego. Elisa has always lived vicariously through the curiosity of Elfie. But now that we can’t get out much, Elfie explores the outside world for Elisa because a small inquisitive cat can go places that big people can’t. And cats see things that people don’t.”