Mark Wagner

American, b. 1971; BFA 1995
Lives and works in Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Mark Wagner grew up in North Central Wisconsin and received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995. As a student initially focused on painting, he worked with Jim Dast in Memorial Library’s conservation lab, which led him to Walter Hamady’s classroom and bookmaking. Smoke in My Dreams, the second artists’ book from Wagner’s Bird Brain Press, incorporated found cigarette packaging and hinted at the collage work for which he would later become known. At the UW, Wagner met fellow student Christopher Wilde and Marshall Weber, an instructor. The three of them moved to New York City and, in the late 1990s, co-founded with other artists the Booklyn Artists Alliance, an organization promoting artists’ books, zines, and other handmade or printed works on paper. In New York, Wagner assisted Ruth Lingen, another UW alum, with print projects featuring artists such as Chuck Close. After Wagner experimented with fragments of his UW and high school diplomas in collages—“I mean no commentary on my time at UW-Madison,” he says—he turned to dollar bills. His intricate dollar bill collages have evolved over the years to include portraits of Abraham Lincoln, the Mona Lisa, and Donald Trump. In fact, the charred remains of the Trump collage, which Wagner framed, sold to a private collector. Wagner lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has published artists’ books with Bird Brain Press, Booklyn, and X-ing Books, an imprint he shares with his wife, Amy Mees.