Judith Belzer

Judith Belzer, From the Anthropocene #5, oil on canvas, 60" x 60", 2015.

Judith Belzer (born 1956) is an American painter based in Berkeley, California. She is known for semi-abstract oils and watercolors depicting invented landscapes in which the natural and built worlds collide and adjoin. These hybrid scenes have been described as dynamic, distanced but expressive, and non-prescriptive—more provocative than overtly critical observations of environmental change. Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA), Nevada Museum of Art, and Mills College Art Museum. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of BAMPFA and the Nevada Museum of Art. In 2014, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Belzer is married to journalist and author Michael Pollan. During that time, she began receiving critical attention for nature-based paintings through surveys and exhibitions at Berry-Hill Galleries (1996–2005) in New York and Richardson-Clarke Gallery in Boston (1994–2000).

In 2003, Belzer moved from the East Coast to Berkeley, where the scope and sprawl of the skies, landscape and urbanized environment gradually transformed her work. Valerie Carberry (Chicago, 2007–10), and George Lawson (2010–16), Anglim Trimble (2021) and Hosfelt Gallery (2022–present) in San Francisco.

Work and reception Belzer's art is unified by a sustained engagement with and gradually expanding conception of what "nature" comprises. gestural, linear mark-making that observers connect to text and her early studies in language; flights of leaves, branches and organic shapes set against muted oil washes that evoked the transience of seasons and life and ranged in mood from meditative to exuberant. Other writers related this work to post-war all-over painting, calligraphy, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Monet. She has been a visiting lecturer at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in 2015 and at Harvard University from 2017 to 2024. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, and Nevada Museum of Art.