Bonnie Collura

Bonnie Collura, "The Prince" exhibition, Smack Mellon, 2019; counterclockwise: Matriarch/Heavy Metal/Jesus, Skin of a Dancing Ghost: Jesus, Guardian Blue, Skin of a Dancing Ghost: Lincoln, Mortality/Evening/Lincoln (all 2018).

Bonnie Collura (born 1970) is an American artist known for figurative multi-media sculptures, textiles and installations created by processes of compositing and sampling. Her art oscillates between abstraction and figuration, mixing aesthetics from baroque sculpture, contemporary animation and quilting with iconic fragments from pop culture, art history and myth. She has embraced theatricality and excess, intertextuality and digital-age influences in her work, often exploring hybridized, disjointed bodies, surrogate characters and reconfigured literary tropes. Sculpture critic Ann Landi has written, "Collura incorporates wildly diverse materials and processes while also drawing on a wide array of references—everything from cartoons and movies like Star Wars to highbrow texts such as The Prince and Frankenstein ... Diffuse and open-ended, appealing to storytelling and world-making, her work continues to evolve, carrying on a feminist tradition in its materials and mythologies." Smack Mellon, Hallwalls, and Dallas Museum of Art. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Skulpturen Park Köln (Cologne Sculpture Park), among others.

Education and career Collura was born in 1970 in Port Jefferson, New York. She received a BFA (1994) from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where she studied with sculptors Elizabeth King and Myron Helfgott. the Aldrich Museum, and solo shows at Janice Guy (1997), Basilico Fine Arts (1998, 1999) and Lehmann Maupin (2000) in New York, and Walker Art Center (2000). Smack Mellon (2019), among others.

Work and critical reception Collura emerged in the later 1990s among artists responding to such issues as the disavowal of referentiality and narrative by modernism, postmodern information overload, and the collapse of various universal distinctions (e.g., organism and machine, human and animal). Her work has often been described as "hybrid," fitting disparate physical and conceptual elements, processes, references and signifiers into uneasy wholes.

Critics ascribe to her work a sense of mutability (despite its generally fixed form) and duality rendering it vaguely familiar, yet iconoclastic and alien. Artforum'''s Jan Avgikos wrote that it "tapped into a cutting edge where comics, cartoons, and movies meet computer-generated models, animation, and special effects ... a virtual reality of mutability: everything is familiar, thoroughly generic, and constantly morphing. Characters bleed into one another, crossing temporal and spatial boundaries." She exhibited ten multipart sculptures in "From A to C and Back Again" (Basilico, 1998), which employed shattered fragments reassembled into legible and semi-legible, candy-coated forms and multiple non-linear narratives. The Prince's "Seven" works also focus on the figure; its seven figural triads weave tropes involving vices and virtues (e.g., the outdoor work, Doc/Pride/Humility'', 2011, Ehrenbreitstein Fortress). The figures balance chaos and composure, optically shifting between forms and states of unrest or becoming, depending on vantage point.

In her later work, Collura often turned to soft-form constructions made with found fabric and materials that evoke a sense of ever-changing identity. In 2021, she was recognized by the International Sculpture Center with an Outstanding Educator Award; she has also received several research grants from Penn State University.

In 2021–22, Penn State supported her trans-disciplinary project, "Together, Tacit," which enables the visually impaired and sighted to collaborate on sculptures inspired by how both groups "see" and learn by doing.

Her work belongs to the public collections of the Collection Lambert (France), Dallas Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others.