Artist

Bio

Twin Cities metro based Virginia Townsend, aka bunny rabbit, paints from her experience with mental health, illness, disability, and her own unique vision of recovery. Born to parents living with mental illness, Townsend honed her critical thinking skills early by discerning between her parent's hallucinations, illusions, and reality. In her artistic work Townsend uses this skill to play with concepts of objective truth and perception, and how they intertwine in mental health recovery communities.

Since 2019, Townsend has been creating art full time, with her current practice supported by MSS, a progressive day program supporting people with disabilities.

Living with her own mental illness, Townsend has experience making art in nontraditional settings. She learned to connect emotion and image in hospital-based occupational therapy groups and continued her journey by painting full time in adult day programs. Having spent time in inpatient mental health units so frequently, she has a strong sense of community and belonging with individuals frequently hospitalized, or "revolving door patients,” and the unique obstacles they face receiving care.

Quiet in person, her voice speaks loudly through her abstract and figurative art. Townsend brings attention to cracks in support services, lack of safe assisted living settings for women and femmes, and well intentioned policy that may have disastrous effects. She  advocates for women and femmes needing 24/7 supports who cannot find settings without sacrificing privacy or choice of who they reside with. Townsends short-term goal is to have the Minnesota Department of Health track the number of women/femme-only assisted living settings versus male-only and coed, compare the number and living conditions, and create a system where these demographics are searchable to the public. 

Townsend is a recipient of a FY2024 Creative Individuals grant funded by the Minnesota State Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also the grantee of Arts Midwest’s 2024 Midwest Award for Artists with Disabilities. Her work has been used for advertising and licensed for greeting card, book, and zine cover art. She's served as a panelist for the Minnesota State Arts Board’s FY2023 Arts Education grant and for an online Neurodiverse Literature and Art panel open to the community. Townsend has work in Minnetonka United Health Care, the University of Minnesota's Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, and private collections.