Bio:

Emma Stevenson Cowan earned her BFA and MS in Art and Design Education from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, with a concentration in painting and art history. After graduating, she moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she worked as a full-time art teacher at an alternative charter school serving at-risk youth.

Emma later returned to her hometown of Bethesda, Maryland, to join the faculty at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, where she taught high school studio art. During this time, she rekindled her passion for painting, leading to her first solo exhibition at the Park View Gallery at Glen Echo Park in 2018. Since then, she has continued to paint and recently returned to the Park View Gallery for a second solo show, this time featuring a new focus on landscape painting.

Emma currently teaches art to children of all ages at Glen Echo Park.

Explore more of Emma’s art education work at emmateachesart.com.

Artist Statement:
My work explores memory, place, and the shifting nature of personal perception. Earlier in my practice, I painted recollections—layering color fields with imagined, hand-drawn typography inspired by vintage signage. These pieces romanticized the aesthetics of early 20th-century advertising. The imperfect lines and faded colors echoed the way memory distorts over time. Through that work, I developed a fascination with the feeling of nostalgia. 

More recently, my focus has turned outward—toward the landscape. This body of work began as an open-ended experiment: Am I a landscape painter? Each piece examines why I’m drawn to the outdoors. I paint places I’ve visited once and those I return to frequently, working from life or personal photographs. Some images, originally captured for social media, have taken on new meaning in the studio, becoming vehicles for memory, mood, and atmosphere. A few include figures—anchors within the space that offer context or narrative.

Lately, I’ve begun to see the human face as its own kind of landscape. In recent portrait work, I explore form, tone, and expression with the same curiosity I bring to skies, trees, or fields. These portraits extend my ongoing interest in memory and identity, while offering a new terrain to observe, interpret, and reimagine.

Across these bodies of work—text-based paintings, landscapes, and portraits—I see a common thread: an attempt to hold on to something fleeting, to translate a moment into marks and color, and to honor the imperfect ways we remember and relate to the world around us.