Marek Ranis

Marek Ranis is a Professor and the Sculpture Area Coordinator in the Department of Art & Art History and a multi-media environmental artist. Through sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and video, Ranis explores social, political, and anthropological aspects of phenomena such as climate change.

He is a recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies, including UNESCO Aschberg Fellowship, American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant, and NC Artist Fellowship Award. Ranis has presented work in more than a hundred individual and group shows nationally and internationally. His work is included in private and public collections in North America and Europe.

Since 2003, Ranis has been working on an artistic project and research titled “Albedo,” focusing on global climate change and the era of Anthropocene. He continues working in Alaska, Iceland, Greenland, Norway Australia, and South Africa. In 2016, he oresented his research at the Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Arctic Circle Assembly is the largest international gathering on the Arctic, bringing together governments, universities, think tanks, corporations, indigenous communities, and other organizations to address challenges facing the Arctic. In 2017, in recognition of his work and research in the Arctic Circle, Ranis was appointed Curator at Large at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska.

In 2019, Ranis joined a research project funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as artist-in-residence. The project, “Quantifying climate-dependent subcritical cracking and mechanical weathering over geologic time,” is led by Professor Missy Eppes in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, with Professor Russ Keanini in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science.  Read more in this article in The Charlotte Observer.