Ellen Piccolo is a New York-based artist whose practice, after five decades of representational oil painting, evolved to abstraction and textiles. Influenced by Nancy Crow, she began incorporating painted images of boats and maritime forms into abstract compositions, developed through collage and translated into fabric.

Born in Brooklyn, Ellen studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School as a teen, earned a B.S. from CUNY in 1977, and completed her MFA at Brooklyn College in 1981. A long-time art educator and former adjunct professor at Queens College, she brings decades of teaching and studio practice to her textile work.

Ellen’s pieces layer stitching and thread over bold compositions, transforming her subjects from narrative to abstract.