Bethany Ann Barto (she/they)(b. 2001) is an artist who works with painting, photography, sculpture, and a combination of them all to build otherworldly installations. She’s pursuing her Bachelor’s of Fine Art in Studio Art at Radford University and originally studied visual arts at The Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, VA with a focus on glass sculpture and 2-D mixed media. After returning to art after a 4 year break, she exhibited in several places on the East Coast and received continued support for her practice through two scholarships, the Jack Yeats Scholarship in Art and the Andrew W. Ross Endowed Photography Scholarship.

Barto creates multidisciplinary installations using paintings, photography, and sculptures to reject aged views of the past and embrace the promise of a cosmic future. She explores the dichotomy between struggling to remain present, and escaping into the sublime, timelessness of spacescapes and interstellar abnormalities. The work exists at an in-between of something and nothing, and lives as an artifact from searching for a dream-like numbness and an escape from existentialism.

She abstract stars, nebulas, and celestial objects into new realities across paintings, photography, and sculpture with faceless, or formless, figures embracing that chaos. Barto’s work embodies an unexpected analysis of self and that facet of identity taking on a world of its own. As said by the mad scientist in Fessenden’s Worlds by Edmond Hamilton, “For this is the universe I have created,” Barto lives to create her own universe to willingly seek asylum in.