Robyn O'Neil

Last updated
Robyn O'Neil
Born1977
Omaha, NE
EducationWerner Herzog's Rogue Film School, Texas A&M University-Commerce, University of Illinois at Chicago, King's College London
Known for Drawings
Spouse Damien Jurado [1]

Robyn O'Neil (born 1977) is an American artist known for her large-scale graphite on paper drawings. [2] She was also the host of the podcast "ME READING STUFF". [3] In 2023, she retired from the art world by posting a Kristy McNichol quote on her Instagram account. [4] She launched a new podcast, called ROBYN'S GATE, in early 2024. [5]

Contents

Early life and education

Robyn O'Neil was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1977. [6] She lives and works in Los Angeles, California. [6] She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Texas A&M University-Commerce, continuing with studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, King's College London, and Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School, Los Angeles. [6]

Professional career and work

O’Neil is known for her detailed narrative drawings that often contain art historical references and center on a theme of existential bleakness and absurdity. [7] [2] Traditionally, her monochromatic drawings have depicted "apocalyptic" scenes in which small human figures engage in acts of violence and trauma. [2] Art critic Christopher French has noted of the artist's practice, "Inventing realities rather than describing aspects of nature, O'Neil's dreamlike vistas offer a potent combination of incorporated graphite collage elements so as to inject foreground detail into ambiguous and otherwise largely unmarked middle distances." [8]

Despite the dark nature of her work, positive signs for the future of life and humanity abound. [9] Susan Harris wrote for Art in America that the "[s]oft, velvety passages of shading; painstaking and lovingly articulated rhythms of line; and the implication of the artist's own hand and arm in gestures both small and grand are palpable evocations of the will to make something out of nothing..." [9]

O'Neil has held solo museum exhibitions at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, [10] Winston-Salem; the Des Moines Art Center; [11] the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] and the Contemporary Arts Museum, [18] Houston, which traveled to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, [19] the Frye Art Museum, [20] Seattle. [6] She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Toledo Museum of Art; [21] the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; The Kemper Museum, Kansas City; and, the Dallas Museum of Art. [6] Drawings by O'Neil were included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2004 Whitney Biennial. [22] [6] Her work is included in the public collections of the Menil Collection, Houston; Whitney Museum of American Art; Blanton Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; John Michael Kohler Arts Center; The Kemper Museum; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Sheldon Museum of Art, Omaha; Des Moines Art Center; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita; and, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth. [6]

In 2010, O'Neil received a FRAMEWORKS Grant from the Irish Film Board for a film written and directed by her titled “WE, THE MASSES,” which was conceived at Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. [23] O'Neil is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, [24] an Artadia grant, [25] and the Huntington Prize. [26] She was featured alongside author John Green on PBS Digital Studios' The Art Assignment in 2014. [27] A recent monograph of her work, Robyn O’Neil: 20 Years of Drawings, was published by Archon Projects in 2017. [28]

In 2016, O'Neil directed a community collaborative drawing project with Harvester Arts in Wichita, KS. The project, The Great Kansas Sea, was inspired by the Permian Sea that covered Kansas 250 million years ago. The massive seascape was created by 700 drawings submitted by 500 participants. [29]

Related Research Articles

Deb Sokolow is an American visual artist who lives and works in Chicago. Sokolow's work uses both image and text to conjure connections among historical events, celebrities, politicians, and her own personal history in order to spur new consideration of alternate possible realities. Her work has been exhibited widely and is part of a number of permanent collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Spertus Museum.

The Art Guys (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing are a collaborative artist team based in Houston, Texas.

Ambreen Butt is a Boston-based Pakistani American artist best known for her drawings, paintings, prints, and collages, and has been recognized for her labor intensive, painted self-portraits that portray feminist and political ideas through traditional Persian art. She now resides in Dallas, TX.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Wilson (artist)</span> American artist

Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason Villegas</span>

Jason Villegas is currently a San Francisco based contemporary artist. He has exhibited across the United States and internationally. Villegas' work utilizes a wide spectrum of mediums including sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, textile, video and performance. He has created his own artistic realm and visual language in which to explore concepts such as globalism, evolution, sexuality, cosmology, and consumerism. Motifs in Villegas' artworks include fashion logos, animal hybrids, weaponry, sales banners, clothing piles, anuses, cosmic debris, taxidermy, bear men, amorphous beasts, religious iconography, and party scenarios.

Beverly Semmes is an American artist based in New York City who works in sculpture, textile, video, photography, performance, and large-scale installation.

Rebecca Morris is an abstract painter who is known for quirky, casualist compositions using grid-like structures. In 1994 she wrote Manifesto: For Abstractionists and Friends of the Non-Objective, a tongue-in-cheek but sincere response to contemporary criticism of abstract painting. She is currently a professor of painting and drawing at UCLA. Prior to that, she lectured at numerous colleges including Columbia University, Bard College, Pasadena City College, USC's School of Fine Arts, and the University of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Candida Alvarez</span> American painter

Candida Alvarez is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.

Rosana Castrillo Diaz is a Spanish artist.

Dawn Clements (1958–2018) was an American contemporary artist and educator. She was known for her large scale, panoramic drawings of interiors that were created with many different materials in a collage-style. Her primary mediums were sumi ink and ballpoint pen on small to large scale paper panels. In order to complete a drawing she cut and pasted paper, editing and expanding the composition to achieve the desired scale. Her completed drawings reveal her working process through the wrinkles and folds evident in the paper. She described her work as "a kind of visual diary of what [she] see[s], touch[es], and desire[s]. As I move between the mundane empirical spaces of my apartment and studio, and the glamorous fictions of movies, apparently seamless environments are disturbed through ever-shifting points of view."

Hope Gangloff is an American painter based in New York City who is known for her vividly-colored portraiture.

Greg Smith is an American interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York whose practice consists of installation art, sculpture, and video.

Celia Álvarez Muñoz is a Chicana mixed-media conceptual artist and photographer based in Arlington, Texas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Stephan</span> American abstract painter (born 1942)

Gary Stephan is an American abstract painter born in Brooklyn who has exhibited his work throughout the United States and Europe.

Cara Romero is an American photographer known for her digital photography that examines Indigenous life through a contemporary lens. She lives in both Santa Fe, NM and the Mojave Desert. She is of Chemehuevi descent.

Gala Porras-Kim is a contemporary interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been shown at the Whitney, LACMA, and the Hammer Museum. Much of her work deals with time, and the way the perception of objects changes over time. In March 2022, Porras-Kim was featured on the cover of Artforum for her work at Amant in New York.

Jessica Snow is an American abstract artist, curator, and professor. Her paintings and drawings are distinguished by bright, vivid colors through a visual language that employs color, shape and texture to speak in conversation with the traditions of geometric abstraction, biomorphism, and color field painting. Her inspiration is fed by research into mid-century architecture, landscape design, 20th century art history and Asian art history. She lives and works in San Francisco, California, where she teaches painting, drawing and art appreciation at the University of San Francisco. Recently she researched Classical Chinese Gardens in Jiangsu province, and her recent ‘Master of the Nets’ series is based on this research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ryan N. Dennis</span> American curator and writer

Ryan N. Dennis is an American curator and writer who is currently Chief Curator and Artistic Director at the Mississippi Museum of Art's Center for Art and Public Exchange (CAPE). She previously served as Curator and Programs Director (2017-2020) and Public Art Director and Curator (2012-2017) at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. Dennis focuses on African American contemporary art with an emphasis on site-specific projects and community engagement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Pruitt (artist)</span>

Robert Pruitt is a visual artist from Houston, Texas living in New York City who is known for his figurative drawings and who also works with sculpture, photography, and animation.

Lily Cox-Richard is an American sculptor. Her work engages with the histories of labor, natural resources, the politics of viewership, and paths of resistance. She is an assistant professor of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.

References

  1. ↑ "Going Deep With Damien Jurado". Aquarium Drunkard. March 2, 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 "His Name Is Legion: Robyn O'Neil at Susan Inglett and Dominic McGill at Derek Eller". Observer. 2011-10-25. Retrieved 2019-07-10.
  3. ↑ "Me Reading Stuff". Podomatic. Retrieved 2019-07-09.
  4. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil on Instagram".
  5. ↑ https://www.patreon.com/ROBYNSGATE/
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Susan Inglett Gallery | Robyn O'Neil". www.inglettgallery.com. Retrieved 2019-07-09.
  7. ↑ Ollman, Leah. "When the cover of a book becomes postcard art: Captivating messages in surprising packages". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved 2019-07-10.
  8. ↑ French, Christopher (November 2014). "Robyn O'Neil". ARTnews.
  9. 1 2 Harris, Susan (November 2007). "Robyn O'Neil at Clementine". Art in America.
  10. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil: Something Vanished Over Paradise". SECCA – Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  11. ↑ "Robyn O'neil". www.desmoinesartcenter.org. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  12. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil: WE, THE MASSES". www.themodern.org. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  13. ↑ Liberty, Megan N. (2020-02-01). "Literary Drawings Foreshadow an Apocalyptic Future". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  14. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil's first major museum show exudes a sense of dread and wonder". Dallas News. 2019-11-20. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  15. ↑ "Artist With a Cinematic Scope Takes on Cults, Hall Passes and Pajamas With Fort Worth Showcase Looming". PaperCity Magazine. 2019-10-03. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  16. ↑ "At The Modern, Robyn O'Neil Draws the World Burning". D Magazine. 2019-10-22. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  17. ↑ "'Telling Stories': Exhibit to feature contemporary drawings by three female artists". The Press. 2020-11-01. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  18. ↑ "Perspectives 150: Robyn O'Neil". Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  19. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil | Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art". museum.cornell.edu. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  20. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil". Frye Art Museum. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  21. ↑ Sharp, Sarah Rose (2021-01-28). "Three Artists Illustrate the Expressive Potential of Drawing". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  22. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil". whitney.org. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  23. ↑ "Shutterbugs". The Irish Times. Retrieved 2019-07-10.
  24. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil". Joan Mitchell Foundation. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  25. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil". Artadia. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  26. ↑ "Artforum.com". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  27. ↑ Psychological Landscape – Robyn O'Neil | Season 1 Episode 14 | The Art Assignment , retrieved 2019-07-10
  28. ↑ "Dallas gallerist launches art book company with 2 must-have titles". CultureMap Dallas. Retrieved 2019-07-10.
  29. ↑ "Robyn O'Neil | Past Artists". Harvester Arts. Retrieved 2021-03-06.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.