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Peter Rice Bruun (b. 1963) is a Danish-American artist, curator and writer.
Contents
- Early life
- Education
- Early career
- Community Engagement
- Art on Purpose
- Back to the Studio
- The New Day Campaign
- Move to Maine
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Peter Rice Bruun (b. 1963) is a Danish-American artist, curator and writer.
Born in Copenhagen to American Barbara "Bobbie" Leventhal and Danish surgeon and naturalist Bertel Bruun, Bruun spent his early years in Denmark before relocating to the U.S. after his parents divorced.
Bruun spent his elementary school years in New York City attending Manhattan Country School. After moving to London for his step-father Player Crosby's business and attending the American School in London for several years, Bruun went on to the Dalton School where he frequently took art classes, studying with the likes of Aaron Kurzen and graduating in 1981.
During his freshman year at Williams College, Bruun took an introductory art history course and discovered he had a knack for the subject, declaring an Art History major. In fall of 1983, Bruun spent a semester abroad in Florence, an experience that proved pivotal. He fell in love with looking at art, traveling each weekend to tour cathedrals and museums.
Though not a studio major at Williams, Bruun took part in the Senior Art Show at the Williams College Museum of Art in spring 1985. Around the same time, he also exhibited at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, having been a co-winner (with classmate Michael Govan) of the Bloedel Travel Fellowship, given annually to a Berkshire County art student.
After college, Bruun earned his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art Mount Royal School of Art, attending from1987 to 1989 and studying with Babe Shapiro, Sal Scarpitta and Hermine Ford.
After receiving his MFA in 1989, Bruun began working in MICA’s Exhibitions Department as Gallery Manager, a position he left after six months to begin teaching at Baltimore area colleges as an adjunct professor of art. Juggling a new young family (his first of three daughters was born in early 1989), part-time jobs, and his studio work, he had little time for anything else, though he made a point of visiting museums and galleries as often as he could.
Influenced by a new job at Villa Julie College (now Stevenson University) in 1997, Bruun began to bring curation and social engagement into his art practice. The university had a new art center and gallery, but no plans for an exhibitions program. Then an adjunct professor, convinced the administration to allow him to serve as Exhibitions Director for a year. The undertaking succeeded, the gallery garnering such recognition as Baltimore City Pape r’s “Top 10” for the year and Baltimore Magazine’s annual “Best of” list.
After leaving Villa Julie College in 1998 and following a six-month period in which he worked briefly as Exhibitions Manager for the Contemporary Museum of Baltimore in 1999, Bruun became founding Exhibitions Educator for The Park School of Baltimore. As Exhibitions Educator, he pioneered a gallery program that put side-by-side works by local and national artists with art and objects from and by Park students and faculty.
In 2005, seeking to bridge the divide between his work at Park School and his studio practice, Bruun founded the non-profit organization Art on Purpose, dedicated to using art to bring people together around issues and ideas. At the outset, projects were intended to at times center on his studio practice. Within a year, however, his art making was displaced by demands of non-studio-based projects such as Real City Dream City, Maps on Purpose, Everyone an Artist, and Heroes in Our Midst—projects involving multiple artists, communities, and major cultural institutions.
In June 2010, Bruun stepped down as founding director, though he remained involved in Art on Purpose through 2011 and its final project (the organization folded in 2012), serving as Coordinator for the Black Male Identity Project. In addition to his work with BMI in 2011, Bruun was contracted by Marian House to create 30 Women, 30 Stories, a project centered around a book, audio stories, DVD, and traveling exhibition highlighting the success stories of 30 women whose lives had been transformed by Marian House.
Following Bruun’s tenure with Art on Purpose he picked up in the studio where he had left off: making work derived from self-portraiture, continuing to unearth new variations from a single motif. At the same time, interested in applying all he had learned about social engagement from his Art on Purpose years to his studio practice, he began to host small gatherings in his studio—boutique events with select works of his on the wall, back-drops for performance and sharing on topics related to the art on display; sketches of social engagement possibilities.
During this time (2013) he conceived of his first major post-Art on Purpose studio project, Autumn Leaves —similar to his previous studio projects though grander in scale. By early 2014 had recruited more than 70 participants for the project.
Then, his daughter Elisif died.
Within hours of learning about his daughter’s death from an accidental overdose, Bruun had already begun envisioning drawings he needed to make about his loss.
That was just the beginning.
After completing the Autumn Leaves project in fall 2014, Bruun began work on the New Day Campaign, an initiative challenging the stigma of addiction, including his own project honoring his daughter, “Elisif’s Story” . The success of the Campaign in 2015 attracted national attention, and Bruun was invited to speak at several behavioral health conferences and received broad recognition, including a Baltimore City Health Equity Leadership Award from Baltimore City’s Health Commissioner and a commendation from entrepreneur and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, who named him one of 10 national innovators at the 2018 Bloomberg American Health Summit in Washington, D.C.
Around the same time, Bruun’s studio practice took a turn: he began making abstract works based figures in relationship to one another rather than self-portraiture. He began this pivot while in residence at Yellow Barn, where the interaction between musicians playing together struck Bruun as a powerful metaphor of what it means for humans to need one another.
Bruun began working on Beyond Beautiful: One Thousand Love Letters in 2017—a project that culminated in early 2019. At its conclusion and ready for another change, Bruun also ended the New Day Campaign.
In 2019, Bruun moved to midcoast Maine, and since then has been making paintings and drawings in various media, all inspired directly by his need to process the loss of his daughter and all that followed. He is contemplating a major studio project in 2024 (the 10th anniversary year of his daughter’s passing), tentatively called First the Crying.
Since 2020, Bruun has begun two different digital initiatives. Yarrow & Cleat became a platform for his writing, something that previously had never before been front and center in his work. Additionally, the online exhibition program Bruun has initiated on his Bruun Studios website/platform permits him to continue his collaborative work in the digital realm. ( Grace was his first online exhibition; Becoming is his second multi-media online endeavor.)
He continues to seek balance between solitary work and community connection, now that his community is no longer limited by geography.
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