Linda Fleming

Linda Fleming, Lightning, stainless steel and Tnemec paint, 144"h x 114"w x 69.5"d, 2022, Big Sky Community Center, Montana. Linda Fleming (born 1945) is an American sculptor and former educator. She has been active since the late 1960s, producing abstract, monumental and miniature constructions and figurative and abstract drawings, employing materials including laser-cut steel, salvaged wood logs and beams, bronze, wool, rubber, glass and paper. Critics describe her sculpture as at once evocative of ephemeral, structural and cosmological phenomena: subatomic particles, the paths of stars and nebulae, human instruments and contraptions, abstract thought, webs, lace and smoke. Donna Schumacher of Sculpture observed, "Fleming has been evolving a body of work that strives to express the simultaneous realities found in the space between: between conscious and subconscious, form and matter, science and art, between this world and the one just beyond perception." Denver Art Museum, International Quilt Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, Her work is held in the collections of the Berkeley and Oakland museums and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others.

Biography Fleming was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She studied art at Carnegie Mellon University and the San Francisco Art Institute before moving to New York City to become an artist in 1967. She became involved with the early SoHo art scene, including artists from the influential co-operative Park Place Gallery, such as Mark di Suvero, Dean Fleming and Frosty Myers; her work appeared in the gallery's last exhibition.

After Park Place closed, she went to Colorado with Dean Fleming to set up a rural version of the gallery with art studios. In 1968, they married and co-founded an artist community, Libre, with other artists on 360 acres in the Huerfano Valley of the Rocky Mountains. She and other members designed and built their own home-studios (in her case, a geodesic dome, then a straight-walled structure) and the community infrastructure, and created by-laws for self-governance that remain in effect more than fifty years later. Fleming regards the seasonal migration as key to her process, alternating between outdoor introspection and observation and the internal processing of more urban studio work. This quality derives in part from her fascination with phenomena like subatomic particles, which serve as the common basis of both matter and space. Such concepts inspire her to create works that viewers can at once see, see through, and see inside. The former show displayed 40 balsa, paper, bronze and rusted metal structures resembling folded, hand-cut paper doilies that shifted the work's frame of reference toward ephemeral flows of air, particles, energy, thought and sound.

Critics observe that later exhibitions of large, colorful steel works contrast three-dimensional structures conveying a sense of postmodern mutability with two-dimensional wall pieces tending toward bold geometry and certitude. She has had solo exhibitions at the Denver Botanic Gardens, KANEKO, among others. She has created public art installations at Art Omi, the Berkeley Art Museum, Franconia Sculpture Park, International Quilt Museum, Laumeier Sculpture Park, the Oakland Museum, and Runnymede Sculpture Farm.

Fleming's work is held in the collections of the Albuquerque Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Santa Clara University, Sheldon Museum of Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, U.S. Department of State, and University of Wyoming, among others.