Renée Bott: An American Narrative

Literature serves as both inspiration and material for Bott’s practice. Book pages form the figurative and literal armature of many of her paintings, grounding each work in language, narrative, and time. In her Atlantic Crossing paintings, Bott renders rolling, tumultuous seas across printed texts that recount the perilous journeys made from Europe to the Americas. The layered waves evoke both physical passage and psychological uncertainty, suggesting the courage, desperation, and hope embedded in these foundational crossings.

Bott also turns her attention to a later chapter of American history in the monumental Gone With the Wind (2025), painted directly over the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the same name. The lush, rambling landscape overtakes the text beneath it, suggesting the endurance and regenerative power of the natural world amid histories of human conflict, violence, and transformation. The work beautifully invites reflection on what narratives persist, which are obscured, and how meaning is rewritten over time.

Bott’s Women’s Work series honors forms of labor historically rendered invisible, addressing domestic, agricultural, and craft traditions through a lens that is both reverent and quietly political. The series draws inspiration from the artistic handiwork of women who embellished early American homes with hooked rugs, textiles made by pulling strips of fabric through a sturdy backing to create thick, looped surfaces. Originally born of resourcefulness, hooked rugs were crafted from recycled cloth and everyday materials, transforming humble remnants into richly patterned floor and wall coverings that brought color, comfort, and symbolic imagery into rural interiors.

Bott echoes this tradition by layering her painted compositions over collaged book pages, much as these makers layered fabric to produce functional art. Bold motifs such as animals and florals, familiar in traditional hooked rug designs, connect the work to lived experiences of women whose creativity molded ordinary life into visual expression. In Women’s Work, Bott celebrates the ingenuity and craft of these makers and highlights the often-overlooked domestic arts that were pivotal in shaping early American visual culture.

In Tools of the Trade, Bott overlays silhouettes of humble working instruments, axes, hammers, saws, onto Xeroxed maps, documents, and imagery from sixteenth-century sources. These works foreground labor and craftsmanship as essential, if often overlooked, forces in the making of a nation. The tools appear almost ghostlike, hovering between presence and absence, recalling the countless unnamed individuals whose work underpins American history.

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Renée Bott has always made and worked in art. She worked in fine art print publishing for over 30 years. For the past twenty years, she was a founding partner and Master Printer of Paulson Bott Press, a fine print atelier located in Berkeley, California. Here she worked with luminary artists such as Martin Puryear, Kerry James Marshall, and Tauba Auerbach. Bott specialized in facilitating the creation of complex and colorful intaglio prints within a traditional black-and-white medium. Paulson Bott Press has published over 500 editions, working with many artists. In 2016, the archive of Paulson Bott Press was acquired by the deYoung Museum in San Francisco.