Barbara Grad

Barbara Grad (born 1950) is an American artist and educator, known for abstract, fractured landscape paintings, which combine organic and geometric forms, colliding planes and patterns, and multiple perspectives. Her work's themes include the instability of experience, the ephemerality of nature, and the complexity of navigating cultural environments in flux. While best known as a painter, Grad also produces drawings, prints, mixed-media works and artist books. She has exhibited in venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Danforth Art, Rose Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art and A.I.R., and been reviewed in publications, including Artforum, Arts Magazine and ARTnews.

Grad's work is noted for its loose, painterly invented spaces, lush color, and ability to conjure wide-ranging allusions to land and seascapes, urban sprawl, or ecological concerns. In 2018, critic John Yau wrote that Grad's "patterns and striations evoke watery reflections and geological strata, tilled land and strip mines, without shedding their identity as abstract, painterly marks. […] She evokes a world undergoing myriad changes, from the incremental and unavoidable to the deliberate and cataclysmic." While in school, Grad exhibited at the Artemisia, Allan Frumkin and Nancy Lurie galleries, and in the Art Institute of Chicago's prestigious "Artists of Chicago and Vicinity" shows (1973, 1975).

In 1976, Grad took a full-time teaching position at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. When she tired of small-town life in 1979, she moved into a cheap loft in the "flower district" on the outskirts of current-day Chelsea in New York City, continuing to exhibit in Chicago and nationally. In 1981, she joined the full-time faculty at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she remained until retiring as Professor Emerita in 2015. She commuted from New York until 1987, when she moved to Boston and married Peter Allen; three years later their son, Samuel, was born. In subsequent decades, Grad has had notable solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Danforth Art, the Bernard Toale, Howard Yezerski and Miller Yezerski galleries (Boston), and Findlay Galleries (New York and Palm Beach). She credits that time, and teachers like Yoshida, with sparking her interest in Outsider artists with a personal vision, such as Joseph Yoakum and Lee Godie, who continue to influence her. Her first solo exhibition in Boston (Bernard Toale, 1996) was a synthesis of her travel and nature experiences and her sophisticated integration of abstraction and referential imagery. These new paintings, such as Fruit of the Vine (1996), employed autumnal washes of loose, patchwork grids that formed fractured, Cubist pictorial spaces, onto which she layered lyrical, rhythmic plays of biomorphic shapes, resembling seeds, pods, ferns or branches about to blossom or fruit. She unified the compositions by overlaying heavy, map-like white and black line work suggesting tendrils, vessels and honeycombs, which brought the organic forms into focus. Her drawing exhibition at Bernard Toale (2000) featured painterly watercolor and ink works on mylar and paper, that mixed text, abstract shapes and a detailed, "secret" visual language reminiscent of Klee or Miró. Cate McQuaid called it "meaty, satisfying work" that unpeeled like onion skins to reveal layers of subtle, translucent organic forms and ideas involving spirituality and consciousness; others described the pieces as challenging "koans" enacting an uneasy truce of nature and geometry. Critics and curators described the explorations of primal myths, belief systems and the body's relation to the cosmos as playful, clever and intriguing.

Grad has also produced more than seventy artist books. In 1996, she exhibited the "Origins" series, which features small "dreamscapes" that unfold in accordion formats, echoing the layered abstraction of her paintings. Re-Build, 2012 ). John Yau relates Grad's carefully developed, "splintered pictorial space" and ability to maintain a continuous tension between defined sections and the overall image to the abstract landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn.

Artemisia Gallery In 1973, Grad was one of five women artists, including Joy Poe (her studio mate), Phyllis McDonald, Emily Pinkowski and Margaret Wharton, who started the women's collaborative Artemisia Gallery in Chicago, named after the pioneering 17th-century female artist Artemisia Gentileschi. It was one of the first in the U.S., after A.I.R. in New York. The idea for the collective, initially Poe's, took shape when the five women visited the studios of 150 women artists in Chicago, and then gathered a large group to select twenty founding members who would show in revolving, two-person exhibits. That larger group also included Carole Harmel, Vera Klement, Linda Kramer, Susan Michod, and Alice Shaddle. Grad was a member and regular exhibitor at Artemisia until 1977. Artemisia Gallery remained in operation for 30 years, showing innovative work from Chicago and the world, according to Museum of Contemporary Art curator Lynne Warren, before closing in 2003. She also served as the department's Chairman (1997-2000) and Painting Coordinator (2011-2014). Grad retired as Professor Emerita in 2015.