Talk

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by Joanne Greenbaum. Through her use of vibrant color and intuitive composition, Greenbaum’s work achieves balance via the unconventional layering of forms in a complex pictorial space. A desire for continual reinvention serves as the motivating force behind her distinctive and immediately recognizable paintings, works on paper and ceramics. Often using drawing as the springboard for her paintings, Greenbaum formulates a vital relationship between the two approaches which ultimately reflects her own unique vocabulary of line and volume. Her ceramic sculptures follow a similar path in clay—building structures which lead to surprising and highly inventive forms.

Joanne Greenbaum earned a BA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Over the past twenty years, Greenbaum has exhibited widely at international venues including at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Germany; and MoMA PS1, New York, among many others. In 2008, a career-spanning survey of her work was mounted by Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, Switzerland and traveled to the Museum Abteiberg in Monchengladbach, Germany. In 2018, the Tufts University Art Galleries at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston mounted “Joanne Greenbaum: Things We Said Today,” a comprehensive solo exhibition that traveled to the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Greenbaum is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including The Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant; Artist in Residence at The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant. Her work is included in the collections of the Brandeis Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; CCA Andratx, Majorca, Spain; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Haus Konstruktiv Museum, Zurich; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Museum Abteiberg, Monchengladbach, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS and the Ross Art Collection at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

Talks is a series of lectures by artists, writers and critics presented by MFA Fine Arts. Talks are held on Tuesdays at 3:00pm at 133 West 21st Street in Room 101C and on Zoom. Participation in the Q&A is limited to MFA Fine Arts students attending the lecture in person.

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