Shima, oil, canvas and wood, 50 x 72 inches.
A B O U T T H E A R T I S T & H E R W O R K
An artist fluent in different visual media -- painting, sculpture, the artist book, film, photography and installation -- Joyce Abrams is primarily a painter. This fluency and her versatility have allowed Abrams to expand the language of painting. She has been at the forefront of creating work that pushes the imagination and challenges the traditional definitions and formal concerns of contemporary painting. While working on or altering the two-dimensional surface, her work is a continuing investigation into how we see.
Drawing from a background of early travel and living in different countries and environments, her work has been influenced by many cultures. Her education from The Art Students League, Music and Art High School, The Cooper Union College of Art and Architecture (BFA 1966) through the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts (MFA 1972) shows a lifetime of dedication to the visual arts. Her curiosity, research and study have contributed to the multi-cultural influences in her work. Whether constructing a piece using a variety of matter or simply applying pigment to canvas, Abrams is unafraid of creating a work that is unabashedly beautiful.
Her paintings, as well as much of her work in other media, are developed from layers of memories based on observations and her experiences of an actual place. Each painting, construction, collage or drawing is unique. Pines is one such piece. It is of a pine forest much loved by the artist, a place she knew well, and that she saw at different times of the day and in different seasons. Pines is the culmination of a peak visual experience of the entrance to this lovely forest in Ringwood, New Jersey.
Joyce Abrams has exhibited her work widely over the past 35 years. It has been presented in over 100 venues in New York, Europe, Japan and the U.S. She is the recipient of Fellowships from The Japan Foundation (as The Japan Foundation Creative Artist Fellow 1999-2000) The Corporation of Yaddo and twice from the MacDowell Colony.
Her work is in private and public collections in Europe, the US and Japan, including the following: The New York Public Library Print Collection, NYC (42nd Street and Fifth Avenue), Franklin Furnace Archives of The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, UCLA Anderson School of Business, Los Angeles, CA, Gannett Center for Media Studies, Columbia University, NYC, Burlington Northern, Seattle, WA, Citrus Center, Orlando, FL (Datron Center Lobby Installation), Tokyo Central Museum, Japan, The Atlantic Richfield Company, Los Angeles, CA and Anchorage, AK, Alberta Gas Trunk Line Limited, Calgary, Canada, Smith, Barney Inc., NYC, The Anaconda Company, Denver, CO, Neville Lewis and Associates, NYC, The Atlantic Richfield Company, Plano, Texas, Smith Barney, Upham Harris, Boston, MA, George Kaneko Design, Los Angeles, CA, Milbank, Tweed Hadley and McCloy, 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, NYC, among others.
A brief biography can be found in Who's Who of American Art and current or forthcoming editions of Who's Who in the World, Who's Who of American Women and Who's Who in America. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ARTS Magazine, Women Artists News, ArtSpeak, The Daily News, The Bergen Record, Reading Eagle/Reading Times, Nippon Club News, The Record, Columbia University, among others.
Abrams is currently working on paintings, collages and an installation entitled Now and Then -- JAPAN -- Tradition and Change.
For further information about the artist and her work, you may contact: Raphael Collazo Foundation, 2345 Broadway, Suite 638, New York, New York 10024. Tel: 212.787.0500. E-mail: director@collazo.org.