Nancy Lukasiewicz Gallery

June 5, 2025 - August 30, 2025

The work in Schram’s exhibition primarily uses post-consumer materials in place of raw new materials. He sees these used materials as having come to the end of their human-intended functional path. As they cross his path, and before entombment in a landfill, he collects them. This strategy demands innovation and planning due to scarcity. Schram commits to using only the amount of a certain material that has serendipitously come into his life. This practice has fostered a long interest and investigation into a material’s history and various lives, most recently leading to a focus on how we, as a society, consume and what we waste, investigating the industrial processes that reshape natural resources into modern consumables, as well as the general perception of these consumables as carrying little to no cost.

Tom Schram obtained his BFA in Painting from UNC Asheville and MFA in Sculpture from Clemson University. Schram has worked as a professional fabricator on projects such as the High Line in New York City and the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Recent exhibitions include The Bascom Center for Visual Arts (Highlands, NC), Echo Contemporary (Atlanta), Del Mar College (Texas) and Eastern Mennonite University (Virginia). He has taught studio art at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and the University of Georgia and is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.