ATLANTA, GA.- Runaway Universe is an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Corrine Colarusso. From the shaggy landscape of the Okefenokee Swamp to her ordinary back yard, she has used landscape and observations of weather conditions, to map cycles of the day and seasons, as parallel worlds linked to our inner selves. Her paintings are restless creations depicting a moving and dissolving landscape. Like adventures in time passing, these clusters of reeds and grasses, towers of air and twilight, provide an arena for the meandering gaze, a channel to the everyday spectacular and a way to know the fugitive world.

Especially now, because we live in a time when technology seems increasingly natural to us and nature itself less so, her work connects us to the patterns and signals found within the language of rocks, reeds and vistas that glow. Her paintings suggest that behind every common weed and vine lay a wild and remote hinterland very much like our own.


Corrine Colarusso, Interpretation of Events by the Reeds Just Before the Rain, 2024. 84 x 66.

Runaway Universe will be accompanied by a catalog and include an essay by Walker Mimms. At the completion of this exhibition in Atlanta, a selection of paintings and works on paper will travel to the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN. January 30 through April 30, 2026.

Corrine Colarusso was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, was a Fellow at Yale Norfolk, Summer School of Art and Music and received her MFA at Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia. In 1975, she moved to Atlanta to teach at the Atlanta College of Art (now SCAD) where she became a tenured Associate Professor 1975-1996. She contributed to the college in many ways. She created the vibrant visiting artist program and served as head of the Painting department for several years during her tenure.


Corrine Colarusso, Planet, 2025. 60 x 48 inches, acrylic on canvas.

She has been the recipient of several grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment Grant, and a Fulbright-Hayes research and travel grant to India and Nepal. She has been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, and artist in residence at the University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy, MacDowell, and the Ossabaw Island Project, Ossabaw Island, Georgia. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions for 5 decades and is included in numerous public, private and corporate collections such as the High Museum of Art and the Nasher Museum at Duke University, the Macon Museum of Art and Science, and MOCAGA, among others. Most recently she was selected by Apsara DiQuinzio, Contemporary Curator of the Nevada Museum of Art to receive the Working Artists Project Fellowship from MOCAGA.

The exhibition will be on view at at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia through January 10, 2026.