Eric N. Mack is an African American artist whose work expands painting through collage, textiles, sculpture, and installation. Using garments, moving blankets, silk, printed imagery, and other found materials, he creates compositions that explore color, texture, and the relationship between an artwork and its surroundings. Although his works frequently extend into three-dimensional space, Mack identifies as a painter, emphasizing his sustained interest in surface, light, and material. His practice connects abstract painting with fashion and the expressive possibilities of everyday objects.

Born in Columbia, Maryland, in 1987, Mack grew up visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where his father worked as a plexiglass specialist. These encounters provided an early familiarity with art and its presentation. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union in 2010 and his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 2012. Shortly after graduating, he participated in Fore, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s exhibition of emerging artists, and subsequently joined its artist residency program from 2014 to 2015.

Mack’s approach treats fabric as both a compositional element and a material carrying associations with clothing, personal identity, and use. He cuts, stitches, pins, dyes, and bleaches textiles, allowing seams, folds, transparency, and wear to shape their appearance. His work also engages the histories of abstraction and collage. Sam Gilliam’s transformation of painted canvas into suspended, spatial forms is an important reference, while Mack’s use of magazine clippings, fashion photography, and hip-hop imagery connects painting to contemporary visual culture. In Lemme walk across the room, presented at the Brooklyn Museum in 2019, dyed and painted fabric constructions occupied the museum’s Great Hall, inviting visitors to navigate among them. The architecture became part of the composition, with the viewer’s movement revealing changing relationships between color, fabric, and space. That same year, Mack participated in the Whitney Biennial.

Recognition of his practice has included the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award in 2017, selected by Lorna Simpson, and the Rome Prize for 2021–2022. Residencies at the Rauschenberg Foundation, Delfina Foundation, and Chinati Foundation have supported further experimentation with materials and place. His exhibitions have included Vogue Fabrics at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in 2017 and Scampolo! at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 2022.

Recent presentations include All the Oohs, and the Aahs at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2025–2026 and RARE ESSENCE at the Speed Art Museum, developed through its Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program. In 2026, Paula Cooper Gallery presented You Red The Shirt Off My Back. These projects continue Mack’s exploration of painting as an experience shaped by architecture, light, and movement.

Mack lives and works in New York. His work is held in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Through his inventive handling of familiar materials, he offers an understanding of abstraction rooted in the textures and cultural associations of contemporary life.