Claire Lieberman

Claire Lieberman is an American artist known especially for her sculpture and installations, which explore the relationship between play and violence in contemporary culture. Her expansive body of work also includes prints, photographs, and a series of glass sculptures of toy guns. Her multidisciplinary art explores the relationship of toys and games to conflict in contemporary culture.

Lieberman's projects often center around the juxtaposition of disparate materials in a single sculpture or installation. She combines materials traditionally associated with sculpture, such as alabaster and marble, with contemporary mediums, like video, and other unexpected materials, such as Jell-O.

Art historian Nancy Princenthal wrote that “Claire Lieberman’s visually and conceptually elegant work occupies a field whose coordinates are innocence and violence, venerable craft and futuristic form. Her troublingly seductive sculptures represent danger disarmed by being bound in stone, and also by a streak of wily humor.”

Lieberman lives and works in Illinois and Brooklyn. she moved to New York, where she developed a studio in Brooklyn. In 1990, she held a solo show while an artist-in-residence at the New York Studio School. and the Seoul Art Center, Seoul, Korea.

Lieberman's art has been exhibited in solo shows across the United States in galleries such as Massey Klein Gallery, New York; Pamela Auchincloss Project Space, 56 Bleecker, LTD, Hot Woods Art Center, Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College.

In addition to solo shows, Lieberman's work has been exhibited in group shows with other leading contemporary artists. Her video project, Walking thru Jell-O, was shown at the Chelsea Art Museum (The Food Show — The Hungry Eye, 2007) alongside work by Roy Lichtenstein, Laurie Simmons, Wayne Thiebaud, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andy Warhol. Another notable group exhibition which featured Lieberman's work centered around how artists interpret the design, functionality, and cultural impact of firearms [citation] Up in Arms, was exhibited at Parker's Box in Brooklyn (2003).

Themes in her work Lieberman's sculptures, photographs, and installations of toy guns and other weaponry are representative of what she considers to be “a broad ensemble performance in which play and danger are a short distance apart.”

Lieberman's series of glass guns (from 2010 and 2017) is reminiscent of the toy pistols and retrofuturist space guns of mid century and the science fiction films of the 1980s. Regarding the symbolism behind her glass guns, Lieberman states that “a toy gun is an icon that embodies the conflict between reality and fantasy in the mind of a child, and in American culture in general.”

This contentious relationship between play and violence was further explored in Lieberman's solo shows UDBO PLAYGROUND (2017), at the Massey Lyuben Gallery in New York City, and FUNNY BALL (2022), at Muhlenberg College's Martin Art Gallery. Both exhibitions presented ensembles of hand-carved, polished, black marble sculptures and related prints. The sculptures resemble abstracted depictions of iconic objects associated with both play and conflict, such as flowers and baby rattles, as well as a “butterfly machine gun” and a “bunny bomb”. The memorial is enclosed by semi-circular granite seating. The entrance to the memorial features twenty-two trapezoid shaped steel panels, each with raised text spelling out the name of an infamous concentration camp, such that the passing viewer undergoes a kinetic experience, as if pages of a book are being turned. At the center of the installation is a large column inset with a yellow marble band that alludes to concentration camp crematoriums. A memorial sculpture in the configuration of a play object, Jungle Gym for Johnny Joe is made of unrefined, textured steel rods set in a ten-foot high grid. Moreover, the sculpture serves as a support structure for a series of black stone sculptures. The project recounts the experience of a childhood neighbor of Lieberman's, a Vietnam veteran who returned home but did not survive the aftershocks of war. The delicate skeletal framework of the sculpture, set in a soft grassy field, suggests decay and renewal, and the work as a whole considers violence and its subsequent impact long after events have concluded.

Jell-O installations In the late 1990s, Lieberman began incorporating Jell-O into her installations, combining forms and structures made of industrial gelatin with black marble, video, alabaster, and rubber. The combination and seeming incongruity of these materials reflect ideas of permanence versus disintegration, as well as the variations in evolution of different materials and physical objects. The videos depict a foot disrupting sculptural Jell-O formations that repeat the shape of the water balloons. and Yaddo (2023).

Lieberman has been featured several times in Sculpture magazine, including a lengthy interview about the process, materials, and themes of her sculptural work. Her works have also been featured in The New York Times, Whitehot magazine, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, Art on Paper, and GLASS Quarterly. Her Jell-O and marble sculptures are mentioned in Timothy Newark's book Camouflage (Imperial War Museum of London, 2007), which examines the use of camouflage in nature and culture. Contemporary art curator Suzanne Ramljak discusses Lieberman's glass guns in Loaded: Guns in Contemporary Art (Schiffer Publishing, 2022).

Teaching and academic accomplishments Lieberman is a professor of sculpture and expanded media at Illinois State University,