Barbara Bloom | |
---|---|
Born | 1951 (age 71–72) Los Angeles, California, US |
Education | Bennington College (BFA) California Institute of the Arts 1972 |
Barbara Bloom (born 1951) lives and works in New York City. [1] She is a conceptual artist best known for her multi-media installation works. Bloom is loosely affiliated with a group of artists referred to as The Pictures Generation. [2] For nearly twenty years she lived in Europe, first in Amsterdam then Berlin. [3] Since 1992, she has lived in New York City with her husband, the writer-composer Chris Mann, and their daughter.
Bloom attended Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, from 1968 to 1969, [4] and in 1972 [5] received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California where her mentor was John Baldessari. [6]
Bloom is a visual artist whose conceptual practice relies mainly on photography and installation. Beginning in the 1970s, Bloom has created work in a variety of different mediums including photography, installation, film, and books. [7]
In conversation with Susan Tallman, Barbara Bloom has referred to herself as a “novelist who somehow ended up in a ‘visual artist’ queue”. [8] Bloom has often compared herself, and the viewer of her work, to a 'detective' [9] who is confronted with disparate clues and is asked to form some kind of visual narrative. Her work is often about the nature of looking. She engages her viewer, seducing him/her into a beautifully constructed visual world, one that is underlaid by subversive wrenches thrown in.
Bloom has an ongoing interest in the value and meaning we collectively and individually bestow upon objects and images. She has not been concerned with showing single objects or images, rather with highlighting the relationships between them, and the meanings implicit in their placement and combination. The objects are placeholders for thoughts, and when they are situated in proximity to one another, meanings can reverberate and ricochet off of each other. [10] Additionally, Bloom states in an artist's statement that her
"fascination is with the relationships between objects or images—and the meanings implicit in their placement and combination." [10]
Bloom's use of shadows, traces, Braille, broken objects, partially-obstructed images, [11] watermarks, and micro-images all demonstrate an ongoing interest in visualizing the fragile workings of memory, the invisible, the ephemeral, and the absent. [12] These “aesthetic underdogs, sheltered under Bloom’s wing [...] provide yet another lens for looking at how we seek value in objects and why.” [13]
“During the last year, I produced and exhibited a work titled The Weather... In this work, hovering in varying heights above the floor are carpets, each a subtle shade of gray-green-blue. The carpets have raised-dot patterns forming texts in Braille... The production of the carpets was a complex one, and it was not easy to find a manufacturer able to accurately produce the intricate patterns of raised dots. Working with Classic Rug Collections in New York, a factory in Thailand was found that could produce the work perfectly. ” [14] (Bloom on her artistic process of creating The Weather)
Bloom's work has been shown widely including exhibitions at: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; [26] The Museum of Modern Art, New York; [27] Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; [28] the Venice Biennale; Kunstverein München, Munich; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; The Serpentine Gallery, London; [29] Kunsthalle Zürich; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; [30] SITE Santa Fe; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; La Bienale de Venezuela, Caracas; Museum Friedricianum, Kassel; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; [31] Wexner Center for the Arts; [32] Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum; International Center of Photography, New York; [33] Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; [34] The Jewish Museum, [35] New York; [36] The Front Triennial, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, Ohio. [37]
She is represented by David Lewis Gallery, New York; [38] Capitain Petzel, Berlin; [39] Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano; [40] and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne. [41]
Barbara Bloom's works are featured in a variety of public collections including: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; [42] The Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MAK Museum of Applied Art, Vienna; International Center of Photography, New York; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Groninger Museum, The Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan, the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado Boulder, [43] among others. [44]
Bloom has held teaching positions at: Cooper Union School of Art, New York; ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies; Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University; Columbia University-School of the Arts; Yale University- Graduate Department of Sculpture; School of Visual Arts, New York, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. [75]
Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center is a non-profit art organization located in Buffalo, New York. Since 1974, Hallwalls has shown and shows the work of contemporary artists of diverse backgrounds who work in film, video, literature, music, performance, media and the visual arts. The ideology behind Hallwalls has always been one of a cooperative with artists and the gallery has made it a mission to show work that directly shows Buffalo’s fading industrial past.
Christopher Williams is an American conceptual artist and fine-art photographer. He lives in Cologne and works in Düsseldorf.
Laura McPhee is an American photographer known for making detailed large-format photographs of the cultural landscape—images which raise questions about human impacts on the environment and the nature of our complex and contested relationship to the earth.
Linda Connor is an American photographer living in San Francisco, California. She is known for her landscape photography.
Teresita Fernández is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water in its infinite forms.
Charles Sidney Clough is an American painter. His art has been exhibited in over 70 solo and over 150 group exhibitions throughout North America and Europe and is included in the permanent collections of over 70 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Clough has received fellowships and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Anna Gaskell is an American art photographer and artist from Des Moines, Iowa.
Jennifer Bolande is an American postconceptual artist whose work employs various media—primarily photography, sculpture, film and site-specific installations in which she explores affinities between particular sets of objects and images and the mercurial meanings they manufacture.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.
Barbara Crane was an American artist photographer born in Chicago, Illinois. Crane worked with a variety of materials including Polaroid, gelatin silver, and platinum prints among others. She was known for her experimental and innovative work that challenges the straight photograph by incorporating sequencing, layered negatives, and repeated frames. Naomi Rosenblum notes that Crane "pioneered the use of repetition to convey the mechanical character of much of contemporary life, even in its recreational aspects."
Berend Strik is a Dutch visual artist working and living in Amsterdam.
Sage Sohier is an American photographer and educator.
Cindy Bernard is a Los-Angeles based artist whose artistic practice comprises photography, video, performance, and activism. In 2002, Cindy Bernard founded the Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound, which presents site-relational experimental music. Her numerous Hitchcock references have been discussed in Dan Auiler's Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic (1998), essays by Douglas Cunningham and Christine Spengler in The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage and Commemoration (2012) and Spengler's Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (2014).
Sherry Millner is an American artist working primarily in video. She has also worked in photography and installation art.
Sharon Harper is a contemporary visual artist, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harper is interested in photography as it relates to perceptual experiences between humans and the natural environment. Harper is currently professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
Kambui Olujimi is a New York-based visual artist working across disciplines using installation, photography, performance, tapestry, works on paper, video, large sculptures and painting. His artwork reflects on public discourse, mythology, historical narrative, social practices, exchange, mediated cultures, resilience and autonomy.
Deborah Bright is a 20th-century American photographer and artist, writer, and educator. She is particularly noted for her imagery and scholarship on queer desire and politics, as well as on the ideologies of American landscape photography. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bright's photographic projects have been exhibited internationally.
Anne Turyn is an American photographer. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is also an adjunct professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
Hillary Leone is an American conceptual artist who works across installation, sculpture, video, photography, digital, and writing mediums. Her work has focused on the intersection of art, science, and technology.
Robert Strawbridge Grosvenor is an American contemporary sculptor, installation artist, and draftsman. He is known for his monumental room installations, which border between sculpture and architecture. Grosvenor is associated with minimalism.