We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Barbara Friedman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Barbara below.
Barbara, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
From as far back as I can remember, I loved “making pictures.” I’m not sure what attracted me to it, but I did know that my mother had been an artist in her earlier years and that there was a lot of art around the house. When other kids came over they often mentioned how grossed-out they were by all the naked people on our walls.
Aside from drawing, I read compulsively, and I imagined that one day I would write books and illustrate them. I do remember at one point learning how to draw a poodle. I must have seen a diagram in a book. To my surprise, all my classmates wanted me to draw them one; I felt a sense of accomplishment.
Maybe because of those poodle drawings, in third or fourth grade I was chosen to represent my class at our school’s annual “art assembly”. My rival and I were both asked to depict an event at our respective blackboards: something like “One exciting day last summer.” She was from the grade below mine, but I thought her drawing was much better. To this day, I’m impressed by people who can depict an event they’re visualizing in their heads. That art assembly was probably when I first realized that I wasn’t cut out to be an illustrator.
I was the kind of kid who was clearly more comfortable working from observation. I liked to look at people and draw them. There was the girl who drew horses, the one who drew Barbies, and I drew faces.
Later, when I was twelve or thirteen, I took a few Saturday classes at the Art Students League. It was my first experience with a nude model. I loved it, and I loved the pastels they had me use. When I asked my mother why the male model wore a “loincloth” while the female model was naked, she said it was both to protect the female students, and because the male body was ugly. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
For years my paintings have drawn on a variety of traditions to pursue the theme of dislocation: portraiture, still life, history painting, plein-air landscape, and abstraction. Sometimes one voice from this chorus of influences would dominate and sometimes another. Today I find them all present.
I was born in New York City and lived there until I was 14, when my parents moved to Switzerland. My mother was Swiss. After she died, I was astonished to learn that she had been adopted at 12. It emerged that she had spent much of her childhood as an orphan in foster care, and never told anyone. Probably because of how my mother controlled what people knew about her, I found Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Dogtooth particularly compelling. Dogtooth depicts cloistered adolescent children whose parents rear them on a manipulated version of the world, telling them that the word “sea” means “armchair” and that a cat killed their brother. My mother too created idiosyncratic definitions and expectations but, maybe because of this, she is the reason I always loved “making pictures.”
In the early ‘70s I left Switzerland, returning to the US to attend Beloit College (BA Art, 1976), then RISD (BFA Painting, 1979). I was influenced by Bay Area Figuration at RISD, and when I graduated, I moved to San Francisco where I got a job teaching Art and French. That job, along with having been a teaching assistant at RISD, showed me how energizing teaching could be.
In 1980 I started the MFA program in painting at UC Berkeley, where I was awarded the program’s Regents Fellowship for Art and asked to TA undergraduate painting classes. Once at Berkeley, I started cutting my gestural oil paintings to shreds, reconfiguring the scraps into new works that were no longer rectangular.
In 1983, during my last few months in California, Thomas Albright reviewed my solo show at Dana Reich Gallery for the San Francisco Chronicle, saying: “Friedman makes these images into objects that seem diffident, casual, off-handed almost to the point of one of those mysterious, apparently functionless, discards one finds in thrift shops. But in depriving them of preciousness, of ‘art,’ she endows them with pathos and vulnerability and, through this, a sense of magic of a new and vital kind” (June 19, 1983).
I made shaped pieces for six years after my show at San Francisco’s Dana Reich Gallery. They’d originally been abstract; now torsos, helmets, discarded clothing, and faces in headgear became my points of reference. I should also add that at this point I had moved back to New York (in 1983) and very luckily found a tenure track job at Pace University. I’ve taught art at Pace since then, full time, from then to now.
Anyway, the shaped pieces with figurative elements appeared in a lot of group shows in New York: Artists Space and 55 Mercer (1983); The Drawing Center, Franklin Furnace, Terry Dintenfass Gallery, SoHo Center for Visual Arts (1984); Grey Art Center, Aldridge Museum in Ridgefield CT, Aljira Arts in Newark (1985). Solo shows from this time include White Columns (1984), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT, 1985: window installation); Queens Museum (1985); and two shows in the East Village’s Phillip Dash Gallery (1986, 1987).
My show at Phillip Dash got a full-page review in ARTS Magazine (summer 1986); another solo show at Art Awareness (Lexington, NY) was reviewed in the Woodstock Times (1984). Grace Glueck described my paintings positively in the New York Times when discussing White Columns’ “Update” show (June 21, 1985), and my solo show at the Queens Museum was reviewed by Malcolm Preston in Newsday (“Shaped Canvases and Satellite Abstract,” June 18, 1985). In 1985 I was awarded my first residency, at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. My second would be Yaddo, 1993, my third The Bogliasco Foundation, 2016, and my most recent was Yaddo again in 2022. Also in 1985, I received a grant from the NY State Council for the Creative Arts, to collaborate with poet Kenneth Koch. In Koch’s operetta Change of Hearts, the actors held my shaped paintings in front of their faces as they performed.
My work was also referred to in articles at the time: Art in America (“The Parameters of Precious,” Aimee Rankin, September 1985), Elle (Carter Ratcliff, “Classic Myths in Postmodern Art,” May 1988), and San Francisco’s Artweek (“The Contemporary Portrait,” Michael Leonard, Feb 14, 1987).
My move from shaped pieces back to the rectangle began in 1989, around when my first daughter was born. These new paintings responded to her birth by taking over cultural content from art history, parenting magazines, pornography, toy catalogues, and my daughter’s own cherished Pink Bear, in search of a language that could speak of both woman and girl, nature and culture.
In 1990-91 I spent a year in Roanoke, Virginia, where I had a solo exhibition at Hollins College and won “Best in Show” at the Roanoke City Art Show, judged by Lowery Sims (1991). After seeing those shows, curators at the Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts offered me a solo exhibition, which took place in 1992.
After an academic year in Roanoke I moved back to New York, got tenure at Pace, and had a solo show at Carnegie-Mellon University’s Hewlett Gallery (1992). The works I showed there also appeared in group shows including “Child’s Play” (Art in General, 1993); “1920” (Exit Art, 1993), and “Postcards from Alphaville” (P.S.1, 1992-93). In ARTS, J. Hoberman wrote that my painting at P.S. 1 “used Godard as a stand-in for patriarchal artistic authority, addressing the gap between his formal and political radicalism and his attachment to traditional gender roles” (Feb. 1993).
At this time some paintings started to be acquired for museum collections. Over the span of my career, my paintings have been purchased by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT); the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum (Hollins University, Roanoke, VA); Franklin Furnace (NYC); the Marvin Sackner Collection of Concrete Poetry; MTV; the New York MTA Subway Arts Program; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Taubman Museum of Art (Roanoke, VA); and Yale University’s Beinecke Collection (New Haven, CT).
In 1994 I won a competition to do a painting for the M.T.A.’s “Art in the Subways’ Poster Project, and in 1995 my second daughter was born. Two years later the Painting Center gave me a solo show for my “Wet Nurse Series,” a response to Linda Nochlin’s essay about the Berthe Morisot painting “Wet Nurse and Baby.” In my series, each painting depicted my new baby in the arms of a different person, in front of a landscape derived from Morisot’s.
Another displacement was enacted in the paintings that followed the “Wet Nurse Series”, again in the vocabulary of landscape and portraiture. I saw my paintings’ spaces as homelands that people moved into or from; and in “The Road to Cleveland” I followed a group of my family members as they moved from a tiny Greek village, Lekka, to Cleveland. I tried to capture the jarring difference between those two homes and yet make it believable that someone could look at one but see the other, as if the two inhabited one pictorial field. A one-person exhibit of these paintings took place at Cleveland State University in 2003 (reviewed in Cleveland Jewish Times, Marilyn Karfield, June 6, 2003); another at Art Resources in New York in 2000. Also in 2000, the critic and curator Lilly Wei included a large painting from this series in a comprehensive survey of figurative art at Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island.
In 1999 I moved home and studio to the Financial District, near the World Trade Center. After 9/11, a more metaphysical displacement appeared in my paintings. Distillations of passing moments, they spoke to a feeling of being optically overpowered. I have shown these paintings in many group shows, and, in 2009, several of them traveled to Wuppertal, Germany. Reproductions of two appeared in the New York Sun (weekend, June 24-26, 2005), and in 2004 I had work included in the show “Night New York” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery. Paintings from this period have also made up several one-person shows: Art Resources Transfer (2002), Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art (2005); Van Brunt Gallery, Beacon, NY (2005), Ober Gallery (2008); and most significantly in a solo show at Michael Steinberg Fine Art in March 2007. Additionally, a group of these paintings was selected for the 2007 issue of New American Paintings, and another group for the 2010 issue.
In 2009 I had my second solo show at Michael Steinberg with pieces that continued to explore the act and the art of looking. They departed from previous paintings in their emphasis on the overlook. The word “overlook” has contradictory meanings and maybe this ambiguity is a hint that the all-encompassing look is also a neglectful way of seeing.
The thought that zeroing in on something makes it unrecognizable remained a constant in bodies of work I made during the next few years: my “Open Water” series, “Alpträume” paintings, and the 56 portraits comprising “Head Grid.” I showed the “Open Water Paintings” in a solo show at The Peter Fingesten Gallery (2010); my “Alpträume” paintings in a solo show at the Painting Center (2012); and iterations of my Head Grid in several venues: Studio 10, Valentine, and Storefront galleries in Brooklyn (2012-13); Big & Small/Casual in Long Island City (2011); and in a one-room installation on Governor’s Island (2011).
The “Head Grid” installation particularly illustrates my concern that seeing more can mean seeing less. This was a wall piece of 50-60 panels, each depicting a head as I thought it might appear to my then nearly-blind mother.
The Head Grid got me fixated on faces, so I followed that series by setting up my easel in museums, in front of Old Master portraits, pretending that the paintings’ subjects were alive and sitting for me. Many of the people I painted wore Ruff collars, the collar’s size determined by the wearer’s position in society. My interest in these Ruffs grew and my museum portraits evolved into “Big Collar” paintings that brought Dutch Ruff collars into the territory of gender and body issues. I showed them in solo exhibitions at Ethan Pettit Gallery (Brooklyn, 2014), BCB Art (Hudson, NY, 2013 and 2015), and Ober Gallery (Kent, CT, 2014). The scholar Marlene Clark discusses them in The Woman in Me (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2019), pp.102-103.
I let the ruff float through different landscapes, until it turned into the type of collapsed tile roof we see so many of in the Greek village that my husband’s family is from. One association led to another. My paintings kept morphing. The roof’s raised central tiles suggested a splay-legged Gumby. The collars that had turned into roofs became umbrellas. On one occasion I turned the innards of an umbrella flying over a town into a massive figure by merely painting out the negative space around it. Suddenly the distant town became Lilliputian, and the umbrella’s spokes suggested ropes. I’d inadvertently created an ungainly, earthbound Gulliver and I started rethinking Swift’s strange tale of world exploration/exploitation.
Much of this work appeared in a solo show “Decollation” at the Buddy Warren Gallery, New York City, in 2016. In the following year I had another solo show in Jersey City, “An Unreliable Narrator,” at Hamilton Square, that included paintings I made at the Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy; I also had a solo show “Strange Bedfellows,” at CAS in Livingston Manor, NY. Also in 2017 I had paintings in a two-person show at Amy Simon Gallery in Westport, CT, and in 2019 and 2020 respectively I had work in two three-person shows: one at Sara Nightingale Gallery in Sag Harbor, NY, with Judith Simonian and Melora Griffis, the second this past February – the show “Hauntings” with Jillian McDonald and Marigold Santos at Five Myles in Brooklyn.
Group shows (all 2019) included “The Moby Dick Project,” at Marymount Manhattan College (NYC), “Play” at Caldwell University (NJ), “Afflatus,” at 5-50 Gallery (LIC), “About-Face” at the Painting Center (NYC), “Divine Interventions,” Christ Episcopal Church, Sag Harbor, NY, “Bungalow,” at the DVA, Narrowsburg, NY, “Quirky,” at Kathryn Markel Gallery (NYC), and 20” x 16,” curated by poet and curator Geoffrey Young at Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC).
The Corona virus came. My process shifted. Instead of starting with pre-determined images, I poured paint, left the canvases alone – as Louis Block writes in The Brooklyn Rail, they “undergo a certain quarantine” – and allowed surprising incidents to emerge from the inchoate spreads of pigment. At that point I would intervene to bring out whatever imagery was suggested by the dried pools of paint. During a chapter of such uncertainty, it made sense to let those new forms appear in their own time.
In 2020, while I was in lockdown, I was interviewed by Brainard Carey on Yale Radio; was a featured artist in two of Jason McCoy Gallery’s “Drawing Challenges”; and wrote invited contributions for Hyperallergic: “Barbara Friedman – A View From the Easel”, ArtSpiel: “Artists on Coping: Barbara Friedman,” , and Painters on Paintings: “Barbara Friedman on Merging and the ‘Extreme Middle.'”
I only got out of my own quarantine in 2021, when I took my first post-Covid trip to New Orleans for a two-person show with artist Philemona Williamson at Octavia Gallery and in 2022 to Ashville, North Carolina where I showed a group of paintings in “Place and Wonder” at Tyger, Tyger Gallery.
My work has been included in a range of group shows during 2022, 2023 and 2024. In 2022, I showed work at Marquee Projects in Bellport, Long Island and at the Laundry King in Livingston Manor, NY. In 2023 I had pieces in “Rainbow Rococco” at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts Gallery in New York, in “Tell Me A Story” curated by Heskin Projects at IGap Gallery in Brooklyn, and in “Space Shifters” at 490 Atlantic in Brooklyn. So far in 2024 my paintings have been included in “Peaks” and “Out of the Blue” at FROSCH & CO, in New York, “Risky Business” at The Torrance Museum in Los Angeles, as well as in a two-person show with Barbara Sullivan at Bravin Lee Projects in Chelsea.
Also in 2022 and 2023 I had two solo shows of this new work. The first solo show “Very Like a Whale” appeared at Ober Gallery in Kent, CT in September 2021. The second, “The Hysterical Sublime,” at Five Myles in Brooklyn in the fall of 2023, and was favorably reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail, WhiteHot Magazine, and Forbes.
These encouraging reviews came at a perfect time, because after 40 years of being a full-time professor of art at Pace University, I began phased retirement two Septembers ago. Although I will surely miss my students and colleagues, I’m thrilled at the prospect of spending all day in my studio, especially with the momentum from this last show behind me and the prospect of three upcoming New York shows – a two-person show at Satchel Projects (Chelsea) in October, a show at Pace University with two colleagues (Linda Herritt and Will Pappenheimer) and a solo show at FROSCH & CO planned for late February of 2025.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I think we all love the psychological and intellectual freedom. It really does feel like you don’t have to grow up. But I would also say that I love the kind of learning that such freedom makes possible, which is very much an accumulative learning. This just gets better with age. So now, after however many years of painting, I can feel as though what I do in the studio brings together everything I have learned in past years, both from my own work, my reading, my life experiences, as well as from all the art by other people that I have taken in.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I’m actually pivoting at the moment. Leaving a full-time university teaching position feels like a major shift. I’ve loved teaching but I feel like my studio really does beckon. If I may quote Louis Block’s review in the Rail one more time: He pinpoints the chaos in my new paintings not so much as the sight of change but rather the site of potential – “a maw of possibility, full of glistening teeth, gums, and tongues, eyes peering out, each one the beginning of a world.” The studio does feel like a maw of possibility now, and I’m anxious to spend more time there watching even larger worlds come into existence.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://barbarafriedmanpaintings.com
- Instagram: barbarafriedman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/barbara.friedman.106
