Barbara Bloom

Barbara Bloom (b. 1951) is an American contemporary conceptual artist from Los Angeles, California. Since the seventies, Barbara Bloom has created numerous critically-acclaimed works in various media, best known for her site-specific installations and photography, but also producing films and authoring books. The artist spent almost twenty years overseas, primarily in Amsterdam and Berlin, and was based in New York City since 1992. Barbara Bloom was married to Australian poet and composer Chris Mann (1949—2018). Bloom attended Bennington College in Vermont from 1968 to '69, and continued her education under John Baldessari's mentorship at the California Institute Of The Arts, receiving Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1972. In one of the interviews, Barbara Bloom referred to herself as a 'novelist who somehow ended up in a 'visual artist' queue,' and also compared both the artist's and the viewer's role in her works to a 'detective' who is confronted with disparate clues to produce their own kind of visual narrative. Her outstanding contributions to the realms of conceptual art had been recognized by many prestigious fellowships and awards over the years: Visual Artist's Fellowship in photography by the National Endowment For The Arts (1986 and 2006), artistic residency at Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD (1986), Due Mille prize at the 1988 Venice Biennale, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1989) and Frederick Weisman Foundation (1991) awards, as well as Wexner Center For The Arts (1997) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (1998) Visual Art fellowships. She was a visiting scholar at Getty Research Institute in 2007 and received a Wynn Newhouse Award (2009) and the Visual Arts grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts (2016). Barbara Bloom's works are featured in many prominent public collections, including The Museum Of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum Of Art, The Art Institute Of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum Of Art, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, MAK/Museum For Applied Arts and Contemporary Art in Vienna, International Center of Photography in New York, Australian National Gallery in Canberra, Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan.