BIO
Amy Ritter grew up in the rural town of Orefield, located in Eastern Pennsylvania. For the past 7 years she’s documented mobile home parks (over 50 sites in over 17 states), and interviewed residents. She’s created and exhibited work influenced by these archives built on her own personal history growing up in a double-wide trailer. She’s continuing to visit mobile home parks throughout the United States, systematically archiving with overarching questions around the American Dream, specifically the myth of social mobility and the stigma around manufactured housing.
Ritter has shown her work nationally for over a decade. She’s been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships; selected honors include Fine Arts Work Center, MA (2016), Skowhegan, ME (2016), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Resident, NY (2017), a fellowship at Yaddo, NY (2020), an Engaging Artist Fellowship at More Art, NY (2021), among others. She received her MFA from Ohio State University (2014) and her BFA from Tyler School of Art (2009).
ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m inspired by mobile home communities and the people who live there. I stage memories of growing up in Li’l Wolf—a place I’ve left but still feel rooted, to expose the socio-spatial, shame of home, phenomenon while humanizing mobile home park residents. I’m also curious about my queer female body at work, as another building material, a symbol of invisible labor. More directly I explore my white working-class family’s experience living in a double-wide trailer and my family’s connection to the American Dream.
I created a company called the MH Archive. Instituting as an archive, I travel across the United states documenting mobile home communities (over 50 sites in 17 states) and interview residents, park managers, and owners. I compile research on the mobile home industry and culture; and create and exhibit work influenced by these archives I’ve built. These communities are strategically relegated to resource-deficient areas on the outskirts of cities, hidden and forgotten. My work exposes and brings to the foreground these challenges to restore the dignity of these people. Using Xerox prints, plywood, gravel and cinder blocks—materials that relate back to the makeshift homes of my past—I aim to represent and understand the environment I came from and navigate the place I inhabit now.
