Jim Isermann (born 1955, Kenosha, Wisconsin) is an American artist. He is based in Palm Springs and Guerneville, California. In 1977 he graduated from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and then received an MFA from CalArts in 1980. His artwork has focused on post-war industrial design and architecture. [1] [2] [3] He has participated in numerous exhibitions in art galleries and museum, and has also created large scale commissioned projects utilizing industrial manufacturing processes. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Richard Telles, Los Angeles (2017, 2014, 2009, 2000, 1998, 1994), [4] Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2010), Corvi-Mora, London (2011), Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2011 & 2012) and others. Recent commissioned projects include works for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA, Yale University Art Museum in New Haven, CT, University of California, Riverside, Los Angeles Metro, and an installation for the Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, TX. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
Isermann grew up in a 1922 Prairie Home in Wisconsin, and moved to Los Angeles, California to attend graduate school at Calarts. In 1997, with David Blomster, Isermann purchased a prefabricated steel and glass houses in Palm Springs that had been designed by Donald Wexler, and after refurbishing the building, eventually moved from Los Angeles to the property full time in 2000. [10] [11] [12] [13]
In 1977 he graduated from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and then received an MFA from CalArts in 1980. [14]
Isermann is a professor of Art at UC Riverside where he has taught since 2006, and has also taught at Occidental College, Otis College of Art and Design, and UCLA. [13]
In 1982 Jim Isermann created Motel Modern, an exhibition in a room at the Inn of Tomorrow, a hotel across the street from Disneyland. Isermann re-furnished the room with his own re-created 50's and 60's furniture and décor, including a giant chartreuse TV console. [15] [16] Much of the discussion around Isermann's work from this period focuses on the cyclical nature of style, taste, fashion, camp and kitsch. In 1987 the Isermann stated, "My art is about fine art becoming popular culture and then coming back around to fine art." [15] [17] [18]
Since the 90s Isermann's work has frequently been discussed as addressing issues of style and decoration at the intersection between art and applied design. [19] Christopher Knight described "The domestic realm animates Isermann's art. He had spent the prior half-dozen years teaching himself a number of homespun craft techniques, gleaned from how-to handbooks. Stained glass panels, wall hangings of pieced fabric, woven textiles and hand-braided rugs are techniques that embrace a homey, lived-in, DIY aesthetic for objects, crossing art and design, functional and not." [11]
In a revue of Isermann's 1994 retrospective of hand made objects including, a clock, a lamp, stained glass, shag rugs, and more Lisa Anne Auerbach writes, "Though these pieces border on craft, their high quality, size, and careful fabrication gives them an industrial air. Untitled, 1989, is an eight-foot-square wall-piece, half painting and half rug-hooking. The acrylic yarn matches the enamel paint, and the design flows almost seamlessly among the different surfaces..." Arbauch goes on to write of Isermann's Quilts from 1994, "A one hundred year old, lifetime quilter could not have made seams more perfect, and if stitches were brush strokes, Dutch still lifes wouldn't even come close to the precision of these works. " [20]
By the new century Iserman began increasingly incorporating commercial fabrication into the production of his work. Beginning with vinyl decals of repeating patterns that were placed on the walls like wallpaper. [21] These installations include an exhibition at the Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany in 2000, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2002. [22]
Painting has been reoccurring mode of production for the artist since the beginning of his career. The paintings are hard edge geometric abstractions that artist produces himself with multiple layers of house paint applied by hand. [23] [24] [25] [26]
Isermann's work is frequently referred to as having a strong relationship queerness and camp. [17] In 1998 Rhonda Lieberman wrote "It's as if the artist asked: 'How faggy could I make a minimalist object?' [27] Notions of Camp are also frequently brought up in relation to Iserman's work. [23]
Iserman has contributed two panels to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt
Iserman's work is most commonly discussed in a lineage that engages in both abstraction, referencing Jean Arp, Anni Albers and Marimekko. The artist has also frequently mentioned how Sister Corita had a significant influence on him [28] Andy Warhol had a significant impact on the artist and Iserman's vinyl wall coverings are often discussed in relation to Warhols wall paper. [15]
Uta Barth is a contemporary German-American photographer whose work addresses themes such as perception, optical illusion and non-place. Her early work emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s, "inverting the notion of background and foreground" in photography and bringing awareness to a viewer's attention to visual information with in the photographic frame. Her work is as much about vision and perception as it is about the failure to see, the faith humans place in the mechanics of perception, and the precarious nature of perceptual habits. Barth's says this about her art practice: “The question for me always is how can I make you aware of your own looking, instead of losing your attention to thoughts about what it is that you are looking at." She has been honored with two National Endowments of the Arts fellowships, was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004‑05, and was a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Barth lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Charlie White is an American artist and academic.
Scott Benzel is an American visual artist, musician, performance artist, and composer. Benzel is a member of the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.
Annetta Kapon, is a Greek-born American artist and educator, who works in sculpture, installation and video art.
Mark Dean Veca is an American artist based in Altadena, California. He creates paintings, drawings and large-scale installations.
Eric Wesley is an American artist. Wesley was born in Los Angeles, California, where he continues to live and work. He has held solo exhibitions in galleries internationally as well as at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Foundation Morra Greco, Naples, Italy.
Lari George Pittman is a Colombian-American contemporary artist and painter. Pittman is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Painting and Drawing at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.
Ry Rocklen is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles, working primarily in sculpture. Rocklen's solo exhibitions often make use of found objects which he adorns or otherwise modifies. From 1996 to 1998, he attended the California Institute of the Arts. Rocklen earned his BFA in 2001 at UCLA, and his MFA in sculpture in 2006 at the University of Southern California. Rocklen's work has been shown nationally and internationally, and has been included in several major survey exhibitions, including "Made in LA" at the Hammer Museum and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He is represented by Honor Fraser gallery in Los Angeles and Praz-Delavallade in Paris/Los Angeles.
Harry Dodge is an American sculptor, performer, video artist, professor, and writer.
Jennifer Chihae Moon is a conceptual artist and life-artist living in Los Angeles. She was born in Lafayette, Indiana and completed her bachelor's degree at UCLA and master's degree at Art Center College of Design.
Bettina Korek is an American arts advocate, writer, and the founder of ForYourArt, a public practice organization based in Los Angeles. She founded ForYourArt a platform to produce and distribute artists’ work. Korek is also a member of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission
Liz Craft is a Los Angeles installation artist and sculptor. She co-runs the Paradise Garage in Venice Beach, California. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally and collected by museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Hannah Greely is an American mixed media artist. She mainly creates site-specific sculptural works that seek to redefine the boundary between art and life. Her sculptures are colorful and often replicate ordinary objects or subjects, with subtle incongruencies in material or form. Her material experimentations lend the work an uncanny quality, as recognizable objects fade from real to fictional. Greely’s work explores open dialogue between object and environment, as well as the theatrical otherness of sculpture.
Lisa Anne Auerbach is an American textile artist, zine writer, photographer, best known for her knitting works with humorous political commentary.
Josh Faught, is an American fiber artist and educator, who creates sculptures, textiles, collages, and paintings. His work incorporates techniques such as knitting, crochet, and weaving, and addresses topics of craft and queer history. His fiber sculptures, influenced by both domestic crafts and art styles such as abstract and color field painting, are often either hung on the wall or stretched over scaffolding such as garden trellises; they are three-dimensional but forward-oriented. He is San Francisco based.
Won Ju Lim is a Korean American artist. She currently divides her time between Los Angeles, CA and Boston, MA.
Virginia Jaramillo is an American artist of Mexican heritage. Born in 1939 in El Paso, Texas, she studied in Los Angeles before moving to New York City. She has exhibited in exhibitions internationally since 1959.
Amir Zaki is an American artist based in Southern California. He is best known for "hybridized" photographs using digital and analog technologies that explore the rhetoric of authenticity, vocabulary of documentary, and acts of looking and constructing images. His work often focuses on the iconography and landscape of Southern California, simultaneously celebrating the banal and vernacular and subverting its related mythology. Zaki has exhibited nationally and internationally, and been featured in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Orange County Museum of Art, California Museum of Photography, and San Jose Museum of Art. His work is held in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, New Museum, and Whitney Museum, among many, and appears in the anthologies Vitamin Ph (2006), Photography is Magic and Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles (2015).
Pearl C. Hsiung is a Taiwan-born American multi-media artist based in Los Angeles.
Sandeep Mukherjee is an Indian-American artist based in Los Angeles who works in the areas of painting, drawing and installation art. His work engages with the discourses of process art, textile art, modernist abstract painting and traditional Eastern art, balancing emphases on materiality, the physicality of the performing body and viewer, architectural space, and image. He is most known for his process-oriented, improvisational abstract works—often paintings in acrylic inks and paints on textured or film-like surfaces—that seek to represent mutable, flowing matter and liminal realms between subjective experience and objective information. Mukherjee's early work was figurative; his later work, while abstract, is often likened to landscape and microscopic, natural or celestial phenomena. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight described it as "ecstatic abstraction, built from color, line, movement and light. Like the dance done by a whirling dervish, who positions himself between material and cosmic worlds."
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link){{cite web}}
: |last=
has generic name (help)