CHICAGO GALLERY NEWS

Phyllis Bramson and David Leggett: Brewing Something New

By JACKIE LEWIS

Artists Phyllis Bramson & David Leggett have collaborated at ENGAGE Projects this spring to exhibit Double, Double Toil and Trouble! With a familiar title served up from the cauldrons of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Bramson and Leggett visually recontextualize the phrase through their individual usage of collage, shared comedic relief and maximalist painting. 

Bramson shared with CGN, “It was my idea to show with David Leggett. I had seen his exhibitions when he used to live in Chicago. Now he is in Los Angeles. I felt people know a lot of my work; I wanted to shake things up!” 

The exhibition calls on and highlights taboos and dares to platform subjects that are usually kept out of sight or only superficially examined. Leggett’s paintings recycle media familiar to the masses, with his work highlighting the importance of humor in dealing with the reality of mundane life. Through hyper-modern collage aesthetics and traditional symbolism, Leggett touches on themes from hip-hop to art history, sexuality, racial divisions and the self.

Considering Leggett’s work, Bramson says, “I find his work to be elegant, well composed and tightly crafted, and I certainly try to do the same. We both use irony, humor and ‘inappropriateness’ – David uses Fat Albert and Black Bart to craft a narrative, and I utilize Orientalism, which I can trace back to my childhood.”

“I take many of my cues from standup comedians,” Leggett explains, “which I listen to while in my studio. Humor and the use of color are two tools that I employ to bring the viewer in.”

Bramson, whose résumé has a few decades on Leggett’s, wields comedy as well, as she is a self-described “painter-comedian”. She admits, “In the studio I don’t practice good behavior. I maim. I raid. I give myself freedom.”  

It’s the intersection of bold commentary on every day life and collective memory that makes Double, Double, Toil and Trouble! a unique chance to witness a visual conversation between two artists at different stages in their careers. For Bramson, “We have a fair amount in common, yet still are quite different. David’s bite has sharper teeth! So while we are not to be looked at as all that similar, we both have something to say about the human condition, collaging and sharing the use of specific ideas about ‘beauty’.”

Mar 22–Apr 27 • ENGAGE Projects • 864 N Ashland Ave. (60622)

engage-projects.com

If your first impression of Phyllis Bramson’s show “Relationships, Anywhere They Take Me,” at Portrait Society happened to be one of kitschy and whimsical paintings with some supplemental objects thrown in for support, I would understand. If you first pegged it as naïve and juvenile, I would probably let it go. Even if you called the work simple and unrefined, I could absorb the blow. But if you spent a significant amount of time with the work and didn’t leave thinking of her as a maker rather than a painter, a builder of personal spaces rather than a renderer, and a storyteller, rather than image maker, I’d go to the mat.

Indeed, Bramson’s work reads from a distance as colorful and intricate in the same way a teenager’s bedroom might. As busy and fizzy and lush and various as possible. Restraint and omission are clearly not of primary importance. If Phil Spector hit teenagers with a wall of sound, Phyllis Bramson hits you with a wall of sight, every bit as retinally maximal as “Be My Baby” is sonically maximal. Upon closer inspection, however, that wall of form and content begins to separate into a kaleidoscoping vision of the particular subjects that populate personal narratives. If it’s a wall, it’s all collected aggregate and just enough mortar. True, her works are painted or drawn without a preoccupation with the natural world, but I don’t think anyone engaged with this show for more than five minutes will continue to think that dwelling on a single outward-facing reality is important to her. 

Bramson’s work is more a stream-of-conscious cocktail of fantasy, memory, and appropriation than it is an observed and rendered picture of something. The experience of seeing the show, too, is much more destabilizing than looking at any observational composition. Sifting through her lavish paintings and objects feels like psychic archeology; a shard of a fairy tale here, a fragment of a personal desire there, a randomly placed found object somewhere else. One senses that Bramson’s production is assembled as her reveries unroll across the threshold from the subconscious to the conscious mind. For example, We All Share the Same Breath (Seven Dwarves), offers a bawdy and personally embellished version of Snow White’s companions. That might be Sleepy and Doc in the center of the canvas, but the third companion looks like a French clown from two centuries ago. And the lady at the top of the composition resembles Victorine Meurent more than Snow White. Four more stylized dwarfs peek in from left. The painting is somehow innocent and lurid at the same time; the trappings of a mature and searching mind scrubbing and sorting, mixing and materializing.

That growing sense of a fragmented narrative stems from the clarity of Bramson’s subject matter. Not her stories, but the pieces and parts themselves. Her work is assembled one discrete component at a time, and when such discrete objects shatter, or are formed shattered as in Bramson’s case, they leave shards that beg for reassembly and restitution. In this light, a found-object sculpture like the extraordinary The Good Keeper of the Animals and Birds isn’t all that different from the paintings. Her two-dimensional work, like the sculpture, is constructed piece-by independently freighted piece into fantastically curious agglomerations of diverse personal material. 

If you look closer at any of her paintings, take the eponymous Relationships: Anywhere it Take Me, for example, one can in fact see that much of the surface is built up with collaged fabric, objects, and other materials. I had to put my eye at the edge of the canvas and look across its foreshortened surface to understand the amount of post-painterly application. A red doll dress and assorted flowers in the case of this painting. When I noticed this additional layer, it hit me like a revelation that her painting and her making were of the same make and model. She paints like a builder, and she builds like a storyteller. It’s all additive. Very little blending, refining or borrowing from the Peter of content to pay the Paul of form. They are simply intuited accumulations of yesses and accreting connections. Bramson’s work, on view by appointment at Portrait Society through the end of August, amounts to a teeming, joyful visual anthology of building and growing relationships, followed assiduously by a courageous artist wherever they may take her.

How do you start a painting?

With a lot of fear and trepidation. It’s totally improvisational because I work with collage, and cut up found warehouse paintings. I’ll sometimes stick a fragment or two on, and just try to figure out where to go from there. I’ve begun to think that I make each piece so differently from the other, and I don’t think that’s the way the art world likes things at this point. I get myself into a lot of trouble and hot water, and I just have to work on it, and work on it. I think that’s why some of my paintings are so awkward and odd, because I’ve had to deal with mistakes that I’ve made, and tried to correct them in some way.

What are the warehouse paintings and how do you use them in your work?

They’re what you might call starving-artist paintings that go over a couch. They’re sometimes advertised that way. I feel it’s being very transgressive [to use them]. I think that my work deals with that gently. Sometimes they’re drop-dead beautiful. They really are beautiful paintings, but I think that’s what’s held me back in terms of trying to emulate them sometimes, they are kind of like masterpieces.

I read that your father, who sold automobile parts wholesale, decorated the house you grew up in with statues and pictures of nude forms, ranging from calendars to pens. The nude or semi-nude makes a frequent appearance in your work, as well as knickknacks, picture frames, and other signifiers of domestic space. Could you speak about some of your earliest visual memories as they relate to your work?

He’d bring home these boxes of Christmas cards. They were beautiful, because we’re talking about the ’40s, early ’50s. Beautiful, beautiful cards. Nude calendars. Pens that if you turned them upside down, the woman would have no clothes on. Kind of salacious pin-up calendars. That aspect of looking at the nude form—because the house had nude statues everywhere, nude ashtrays—was something I was used to. That was part of my early visual training. It was a very eclectic house, which again, is why I think I am so comfortable with eclecticism in my own work. It’s funny because my mother would draw this ’40s kind of face, a profile, that I asked her to draw over and over again. Every once in a while, that face will pop up in my work.

Pleasure, sexuality, joy, humor, and something a little off—sometimes mischief, sometimes sorrow—are present across many of your paintings. What’s the relationship between these themes? Do they need each other?

A curator came to my studio last week. I told her that there are some people who say my work is dirty, and that when I thought about it, I kind of got insulted because I think they thought I was thinking of pornography, which of course I’m not. We were talking about it, and she said, “You know, I think your work is dirty and dainty.” I think if you’re talking about dirty as being covert sexuality, and the daintiness in terms of how I present it, I think that’s a very accurate way of talking about a lot of my work.

I know there are times where I purposely pushed the sexuality, but what a lot of people don’t know is that many, many times there’s a funny clump of stuff, and it’s not exactly pleasant. It’s usually flowers or abstract shapes and they’re clumped. It’s almost like it’s an orgasm. Like the painting is having an orgasm. I always know when it’s going to happen, because it happens when I’m just exasperated. So I’ll make this sort of bizarre clump of some sort, that I know is inappropriate in a way, and it doesn’t look very good, but on the other hand it does.

Duality shows up a lot in your work: couples, pairings of objects. How do you think through duality in your life, studio, home?

I live a dual life. I’m married to somebody who’s not in the art world, and I don’t really share that. We’ve been married almost 60 years. I go home [to the suburbs] on Saturday nights, and come home [to my studio in Chicago] on Monday afternoon, usually. I go to a suburb where there’s a house that’s just a completely different life, just totally different. When I come home [to my studio in Chicago] sometimes on Mondays, I’m just fried from the other existence, and then trying to enter back, and just jumping in. I can’t usually do it. I have to rev up, and by the time I’m revved up, I leave again, and go home. It’s not so hard going home as it is coming back to the studio.

I’ve been doing that since 1985 when I got a full-time teaching position at the University of Illinois. I have to say it’s a little harder now, even though I’m not teaching full-time. I’m wondering how in the world I was able to have a career. I was pretty active showing in New York, and I had an active career. It’s not like it’s not active now, but it’s not as active as it was in the ’80s. Whereas the art world used to come to me, now I have to figure out how to get to the art world. I wish it was the reverse because I could use it more now. A curator came to visit me and said she has a lot of friends who are older. She said they don’t have the energy to deal with their newfound re-energized careers. It’s harder on them now than when they were younger.

Two years ago you had a retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center. Was seeing a lot of your work presented together in that context a similar feeling at all to your mid-career retrospective in the ’80s at The Renaissance Society?

At the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, I wasn’t as grateful. I mean, that was a period when everything was just, “Oh, I’ve got this. I’ve got that. I’ve got this.” I didn’t really think about it. It just happened. I wasn’t as hands-on. It was controlled by this art critic, a man named Dennis Adrian. He controlled what was chosen. He wrote the essay. I just went along with the flow. I think it was more important than I realized at the time. All of a sudden, I was told I was having a show.

Then when I had the show at the Cultural Center, I had to ask, and ask, and ask, and ask. It was so complicated and difficult. Eventually, they said yes. I chose who I wanted to write for the exhibition, and it came about quite smoothly. Then I went to help hang the show, and the curator Nathan Mason had put everything around, but he just couldn’t pull it together. I was wondering too. There were certain things, they just didn’t look right. So I took the position that I probably take as a painter and as a curator myself. I went with color. I said, “Nathan, let’s try dealing with color,” because it wasn’t in chronological order. That worked. “Well, okay. Bring in other paintings about blue.” Oddly enough, they went together conceptually as well.

It was very strange, but I think there’s some way, if you’ve got an eye for things.Even in my studio, if I start to look around, I’ll be surprised. “Wow. I didn’t realize I was putting this against that because boy, they really work.” You know what I mean?In my house, there are certain ways that I put things together, and I don’t do it on purpose. But one day I’ll look around and say, “Wow. Everything’s got this same pattern on this end of the building.” Then it changes to something else. It’s a visual curation.

Yeah, an unconscious sort of knowing.

I trust my eye. So when I compose, I don’t do it in a dedicated manner. For example, because I now advise graduate students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I’ll say, “Why did you do that?” They say, “I’m balancing this with that.” And I’ll say, “It looks trite. It doesn’t work, and it’s a lousy reason. You’ll just do it automatically. Don’t purposely try to figure it out because it won’t work. It just will happen, and you’ve got to trust that’s going to happen because you obviously know already how to organize a composition.”

Do you utilize a painterly approach to doing whatever you’re doing when you’re not painting?

Yeah, I don’t like to follow orders. I was taking a Zumba class, and the guy had these dance routines that we were supposed to memorize, and they got more and more complicated. Then he would do them, and then we would have to do them without him being there. So I went up to him and said, “I’m leaving this class,” I said, “Because you’re turning this into a dance class rather than a Zumba class.” He said, “This is good for your brain.” I said, “It’s not good for my brain because my brain doesn’t work this way.”

I think that it’s so interesting to see the different ways that artists work, because we all don’t work alike, as you know from your own work. It’s one thing I don’t like about graduate schools. I think that sometimes a faculty member will try to get the MFA candidate to work like they work, or to think like they think, and I think it’s really not fair to the student. They’re going to have a hell of a time when they get out trying to sort it out.

Could you speak about career ups and downs, or times when no one was paying attention? What advice could you give to artists who might be experiencing that?

Well, I think that’s the whole crux of a career. There are, I think, some artists who have a mechanism that maintains their power, whether they’re good or not. I think if you’re going to be an artist, you just have to figure out why you’re doing it. You get tested all the time. I’m being tested now, you know, because I do have friends outside of the art world, and they keep saying, “Well, when are you going to retire?” All the conversations are really about travel. It’s just ridiculous to me. I just say to them, “You know, I work for myself, and this is what I do. I have these obligations to maintain. I have these shows I’m getting ready for.” The conversation just stops. I think it’s easier when you’re with other artists.

Nicole Eisenman, I think, has maintained a very strong career. Sometimes she tries something different. She’s allowed, but I think on the whole, she has really maintained a very strong career. I don’t know if she’ll ever be out of favor. I’m not sure she will. It was her moment a while back. It’s her moment now. I think for most artists, if you’re serious enough, you’ll have a moment of some sort. What you do with that moment is another story. I think some people have flamed out. They just haven’t been able to handle it, or their lifestyle has gotten in the way of them being able to keep going. You have people like Louise Bourgeois, who I think again, was allowed to maintain a career and up until the end was quite a force to be reckoned with. I kind of think it’s great when it happens later in life when you might really need it, but mostly I think it happens early when you don’t even understand how special, or privileged, or lucky you are.

Honestly, I think the hardest thing about being an artist is controlling envy. I just think if you’re around people who are doing well, and if you aren’t exactly doing well, it can be hard to be able to handle that. My husband said it. “Somebody else’s success is not your failure. It’s just their success.”

I think there are lots of pitfalls and traps. Maybe there are in other industries too, same for anybody who’s in music, or film. The one advantage you have as an artist is you can keep making your work in your studio if nobody else around is interested, but I think the way people grow is when they are given these remarkable opportunities where they have to stretch themselves. That’s really important. It’s not vanity. It’s just the opportunity to grow in a way that you can’t when you’re just in your studio making your stuff.

What are you curious about?

 I’m always curious, and praying that I will make the most of my time here, that my next painting will be spectacular. I’m curious about, “Can I go forward? Can I do it?” which I think is something a lot of artists share.
 

Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art (PSG) is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of work by Phyllis Bramson. This prestigious Chicago-based artist and teacher is an influential presence whose long career is sometimes associated with the Chicago Imagist group. The exhibition, “Relationships: Anywhere They Take Me,” runs June 10 to August 5, 2023. An opening reception with the artist is from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, June 10 with an informal discussion at 4 p.m. 

Bramson’s lavish paintings are part fairy tale and part Rococo exultation that linger over the foibles of love and seduction. She works intuitively, building compositions piece by piece with painted passages and elements of collage. Patterns that might seem jarring interact with a lively coherence as she places her protagonists in ornamental settings. Her stories of love and intrigue are timeless and placeless. CLICK HERE to continue reading…

Thank you Stephen Maine for contacting me. It was interesting and actually informative to be a part of this project. Click here to see more about Stephen's project on hyperallergic.

“Over the course of a five-decade career, Bramson has pushed figurative painting to its limit with her vibrant, over-the-top fever-dreamscapes. A 2019 solo exhibition at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery and her curation of the widely praised group exhibition “What Came After: Figurative Painting in Chicago 1978-1998” demonstrate that Bramson hasn’t slowed down one bit. During the pandemic, she created a set of paintings, on view on her website, that reference romantic and sexual tropes, art history and Eastern mythologies. She has a 2021 solo exhibition at the Lubeznik Center and is continuing her role as an advisor to MFA students at SAIC”. Click here to read the full article.

A very concise and clear discussion about the exhibition I organized at the Elmhurst Art Museum titled, “What Came After: Figurative Painting in Chicago 1978-1998”. Click here to read the full article.

CGN: How would you define Chicago Imagism?  

PB: I think Chicago Imagism carried on the tradition of the marriage between fantasy, funk and surrealism—a desire to delve into a unique narrative style using intense color and stage like theatrical representations and quirkiness.The problem, it seems to me, is that there are the original Imagists, but now that label can often apply to anyone using the figure in an eccentric and constructed narrative manner. I have often joked with others, “Imagism, the term that ate Chicago art!”

Click here to read the full article.

“A painter, through and through… but like some painters, I mostly hold that notion in my hands. Meaning, I approach painting with some genuine wariness and it always feels like I haven’t a clue about what to do next or how to make my painting work! I actually breathe a sigh of relief after each completed painting. How did it finally get completed?” Click here to read more.

Chicago artist Phyllis Bramson has been practicing at a steady clip for over 40 years, during which time she has remained nestled resolutely within Chicago’s Imagist tradition. The figures here are skillfully rendered, stressed and uncomfortable, and with a healthy dose of kitsch. Given this adherence, Bramson has developed a full pictorial language all her own.

Bramson’s paintings have come to be known for fully- or semi-nude subjects, strange sex, gaudy ornament, vintage Americana imagery, and associations with Orientalism, with all its adverse connotations. All of this continues to pervade the works in her current exhibition “Love and Affection in a Troubled World.” While the density of her earlier works are satisfying for their overwrought complexity, many of the current works are simpler, with hard-edged shapes and geometric abstraction governing the compositions. Intermingling these flat, saturated forms with Bramson’s lively and peculiar figures produces a distinct visual tension - a new development that certainly pays off. 

Glitter, pom-poms, appliqué and printed paper mingle with a wide range of painting styles, from thin layers, loose gestures and airbrush-like spurts, to tight representation and cut and collaged bits sourced from the paintings of factory-like commercial production or flea market and thrift store finds. A preoccupation with lowbrow art is matched with the artist’s reverence for high art's historical canon. Allusions to art history have always been a key element in Bramson’s works, and within the paintings here the artist nods often to minimalism. "In Praise Of Folly—The Maze Speaks" pares Bramson’s ubiquitous figure down to a mere headless torso relegated to the lower corner of a work featuring a winding maze emitting a speech bubble along with a tiny ode to Brice Marden collaged in the upper left corner. Works like "In Praise Of Folly—Spider" and "In Praise Of Folly—Melancholy Abstraction" are each punctuated with weighty black shapes, creating stark, formal divisions within the pictures.

The emphasis in on bold, abstract elements in many of the works in “Love and Affection in a Troubled World” lends an air of order to the myriad of references, sources and materials Bramson has accumulated throughout her long career. "Eve," the sole sculptural work in the exhibition, is a Buddha-like figurine encrusted with cheap fabric flowers and ceramic tchotchkes. She is paired with a small round canvas on the wall. Placed at the entrance to the gallery, "Eve" presides over the rest of the works in Bramson’s exhibition with a calm countenance, setting the tone for a focused and mature body of work.

Click here to watch the full interview from wttw Chicago.

It is always significant when Newcity publishes a review, click here to read the full article.

The exhibition What Came After : Figurative Painting in Chicago 1979 - 1998, organized by artist Phyllis Bramson, is a survey of diverse interests in the figure as a subject, the human condition, and an interest in personal iconography. Many have struggled with understanding and processing the term Chicago Imagism since it was first used in the early 1970s, including artists that built on the ideas of their peers or sought to break free from expectations of that legacy. This later generation of artists—which have been called several names including third generation Imagists, Post-Imagists, and the Chicago School—will be celebrated and better defined through the exhibition What Came After. These painters each became recognized in their own right, but were not branded as a recognized group. The show of 30 paintings will serve as an introduction to these artists for a broad audience, while also examining a specific time and place in Chicago’s recent history. Artists include Nicholas Africano, Phyllis Bramson, Susanne Doremus, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, Richard Hull, Michiko Itatani, Paul Lamantia, Robert Lostutter, Jim Lutes, Tony Phillips, David Sharpe, Hollis Sigler, Ken Warneke, Margaret Wharton, and Mary Lou Zelazny.

“Kiss Kiss Kiss,” the subtitle of Phyllis Bramson’s “Ladies in Waiting” suggests a more cynical view of gender roles, appropriate for an artist with nearly fifty years more life experience. Quoting female attractiveness as displayed in European art museums or Asian gift shops, the central figure seems to be asking viewers whether any of it makes any sense. In “Cinderella, the Other Story,” a parody of yet another Disney fairy tale, the central character tries on the crystal slipper. Instead of being noble and handsome, however, the prince is ugly and lecherous as he fondles her leg and sucks on her knee. Yuck! It looks like the wicked step sisters are going to have the last laugh after all.” Click here to read the full review.

“Artist Phyllis Bramson on the process behind her paintings, the ways in which pleasure and sexuality inform her work, and the variety of ways the world tests you over the course of your career.” Click here to read the article.

“Phyllis Bramson's 1986 solo presentation featured more than 30 paintings and drawings made between 1973 and 1986. “Bramson’s imagery has evolved as a personal typology, although some of the artist’s sources are readily apparent: stage and costume designs, fashion illustrations, popular decorative formulas of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, Persian miniatures, Japanese prints, and a broad spectrum of images in Western art ranging from Bosch to the present day.” (from the original exhibition text)”
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A article that gives a strong case for the nature and strength of Midwest artists (while I feel strongly about this article I don’t think Michelle Grabner or Kerry James Marshall might!)

Click for more information

Featured in (more like snippets) Art & Design in Chicago (produced by Daniel Andries) on WTTW Episode 1: If You Build It, Episode 3: Give The Customer What They Want, and Episode 4: Off The Grid (all the drawings shown are by Phyllis Bramson)

Click for more information

While displaying works by loosely-affiliated groups, such as the Monster Roster and the Chicago Imagist artists, this exhibition will also feature work by students and professors from the New Bauhaus/Institute of Design, a selection of works from a 1970 SAIC portfolio, and other artists working independently.

Artists: Don Baum, Phyllis Bramson, Fred Berger, Harry Callahan, Barbara Crane, Henry Darger, Leon Golub, Richard Hunt, Vera Klement, Ellen Lanyon, Nathan Lerner, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Ed Paschke. Curated by Kathryn Koca Polite.

Click for more information

Click here to view Wikipedia page.

Included in Alterity Rocks 1973 - 1993 written by Jenni Sorkin featuring an image of an early Phyllis Bramson sculpture, ‘Baby Heidi Chair’.

Featured in Hyperallergic’s A View From the Easel blog, showing Phyllis Bramson’s studio (in Chicago, Illinois).

Click for more information.

September 8, 2018 - January 13, 2019

“The Figure and the Chicago Imagists: Selections from the Elmhurst College Art Collection,” curated by Suellen Rocca, one of the original members of the Hairy Who collective and current Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Elmhurst College.

Over and over, the Chicago Imagists cast the figure in numerous roles, distorting it and layering it with metaphor and personal meaning. Outrageous, irreverent, humorous and inspired by popular culture, these works reflect highly original expressions of the human form.  This exhibition features over 30 works from the internationally known Elmhurst College Art Collection, focused on artists working in Chicago between about 1950 and the present.

Click here for more information.

Click here to read the recent article "Art & Life with Phyllis Bramson" published by Voyage Chicago..

Walk into any museum, or open any art book, and you'll probably be left wondering: where are all the women artists? A Big Important Art Book (Now with Women) offers an exciting alternative to this male-dominated art world, showcasing the work of dozens of contemporary women artists alongside creative prompts that will bring out the artist in anyone!This beautiful book energizes and empowers women, both artists and amateurs alike, by providing them with projects and galvanizing stories to ignite their creative fires. Each chapter leads with an assignment that taps into the inner artist, pushing the reader to make exciting new work and blaze her own artistic trail. Interviews, images, and stories from contemporary women artists at the top of their game provide added inspiration, and historical spotlights on art "herstory" tie in the work of pioneering women from the past. With a stunning, gift-forward package and just the right amount of pop culture-infused feminism, this book is sure to capture the imaginations of aspiring women artists  Author: Danielle Krysa

The Cleve Carney Print Portfolio is a limited edition portfolio created to honor the legacy of the late Cleve Carney. The portfolios each contain prints by Chicago artists Phyllis Bramson, Michelle Grabner, Judy Ledgerwood, Tony Tasset, and Richard Rezac.

All money raised through the sale of the portfolio will go to the College of DuPage's Cleve Carney Art Gallery Fund and will be used to continue the presentation and support of contemporary art at the Cleve Carney Art Gallery.

Limited edition of 20, click here for more information.

A group exhibition curated by Matt Morris, "Casting Inside" was previously seen at ADDS DONNA in Chicago, IL, and will be traveling to New York to Essex Flowers.  The show will run from June 29 to July 29, 2018.

Essex Flowers | 19 Monroe st, New York, NY www.essexflowers.us June 29 - July 29, 2018                         

ADDS DONNA presents Phyllis Bramson in a group exhibition with Josh Dihle and Cathy Hsiao, curated by Matt Morris, “Casting Inside,” opening November 17 and continuing through December 16, 2017.

ADDS DONNA | 3252 W. North Ave, Chicago, |L www.addsdonna.com
November 17–December 16, 2017

Collected by Linda L. Kramer and Sandra Binion between 2010 and 2013, these oral histories were donated to the Ryerson & Burnham Archives in 2013. According to Kramer, the artists received a list of questions before their interviews so that they had the opportunity to assemble factual material relating to their careers. Suggested topics included: academic study, family background, cultural influences, gallery affiliations, exhibitions, awards, artistic influences and the role of Chicago in their work and career. The duration of the interviews varies from less than an hour to 2-1/2 hours.

Tom Wawzenek of Third Coast Review, reviews two recent exhibitions at Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, including Bramson’s Opulent Flim-Flam, a show that integrates, “sensual and provocative musings on spiritual matters.”

Click to read more, Third Coast Review.

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery presents Phyllis Bramson’s solo exhibition, “Opulent Flim-Flam,” opening September 8 and continuing through October 21, 2017.

Danny Orendorff, Manager of Public and Community Engagement Programs for the Museum of Arts and Design, writes about Bramson, “Flirting with the psychosexual subconscious of Americana objects, winking at conventions of ‘good taste,’ and pinching at the backside of our public facades of normalcy: Bramson’s aesthetic is that of the bawdy banal. It is sentimental, and it is smart. Through iconography and innuendo Bramson searches for, and somehow depicts, complex worlds of desire, emotion, and curiosity that cultural fantasy, industry, and kitsch-commodity (or, in other words: post-modernity) have conspired to make possible.”

Zolla/Lieberman Gallery | 325 W. Huron St.; Chicago | www.zollaliebermangallery.com
September 8–October 21, 2017

When Robert Sirko was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, the longtime professor of art at Valparaiso University instinctively began drawing images of “evil cancerous beings,” as he put it. While waiting for a doctor appointment in Chicago, Sirko wandered into the Chicago Cultural Center in 2016 and witnessed the work of Phyllis Bramson. Sirko knew immediately that he wanted to emulate her approach.

To read more, click here.

The Herron School of Art and Design is presenting Phyllis Bramson’s exhibition, “Love and Affection in a Hostile World.” The exhibition surveys three decades of work, bringing together more than 25 paintings and assemblages.

Bramson will deliver the 2017 Christel DeHaan Family Foundation Visiting Artist Lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 8, in the Basile Auditorium at Eskenazi Hall. An opening reception will immediately follow the talk. The opening reception and artist’s talk are free and open to the public.

Click to read the Herron School of Art and Design’s press release, IUPUI Newsroom.

Herron School of Art and Design – Eskenazi Hall | 735 W. New York St.; Indianapolis, IN | www.herrongalleries.org
March 8 –April 15, 2017
 

James Yood counts Phyllis Bramson exhibition, “Phyllis Bramson: Under the Pleasure Dome,” among his top 10 exhibitions of 2016. 

Click here to read full article.

Bianca Bova, art writer for Third Coast Review, an online publication covering Chicago culture and the arts, reviews Bramson’s past exhibition, “Under the Pleasure Dome” as one of the Best of 2016.

Click to read more, Third Coast Review.

Ben Medina, writing for Wesleyan University’s lifestyle, arts, and culture magazine, Method Magazine, interviews Phyllis Bramson about her fervid, salaciously funny neon fantasies.

Click to read more, Method Magazine.
 

Lise McKean of the blog, Bad at Sports, talks with Phyllis Bramson about what’s in her sightlines after a recent run of Chicago area exhibitions.

Click to read more, Bad at Sports.

This year, Newcity’s Art 50 honors the artists who inspire all of us to see our city in a better, more beautiful light. From social practice doyens to venerable painters and sculptors, the city on the make keeps making better art each day.

Click to read more, Art 50 2016.
 

A trio of female chicago artists—Barbara Rossi, Phyllis Bramson, and Diane Simpson—are hitting their stride and attracting new fans, well into their careers.

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Artadia will exhibit works by 2004 Chicago Artadia Awardee Phyllis Bramson. Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Menil Collection, Houston, TX, selected Bramson’s work from a pool of Chicago-based Artadia Awardees.

Why “Bad Behavior” and “Inappropriateness” Can Be an Artist’s Necessity in the Studio to read, Booth Talk with Phyllis Bramson and Toby Kamps, access Artadia.

Longtime Chicagoan and veteran art professor Phyllis Bramson has a career retrospective up this summer at the Cultural Center. “Under the Pleasure Dome” is a glorious whirlwind of excess, kitsch and desire in the form of three decades’ worth of paintings and assemblages.

Click here to read the full article.

The most visually thrilling painting in Phyllis Bramson’s thirty-year retrospective is the earliest one. “Shipwreck” (1987) depicts an emotional, rather than nautical, disaster. The upside-down, bare-bottomed heroine clings to the mast as waves swirl around the sinking ship. 

Click here to read full article.

The Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition, “Under the Pleasure Dome” is a wide selection of paintings and assemblages drawn from the artist’s collection and illustrative of her work over many years, including examples of her most recent “scroll” series.

Chicago Cultural Center | 78 E. Washington St.; Chicago, IL | www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca.html
June 4–August 28, 2016

The perfumed garden (loss of happiness), 16' apart including scroll, mixed media, found objects, and paper scroll, 27" W × 60 " H × 18' L (approx.) 2016

In a special tribute this summer, the Chicago Department of Transportation will take inspiration from Phyllis Bramson’s artwork for the design and color palette of the median landscaping along Michigan Avenue from Roosevelt Road to Oak Street. Bramson’s 30 year retrospective, “Under the Pleasure Dome,” will be exhibiting at the Chicago Cultural Center starting in June. Through interviews, studio visits and analysis, CDOT has produced a landscape design that reflects the curving natural forms and fanciful imagery found in Ms. Bramson’s art.

Surrealism: The Conjured Life, curated by Lynne Warren, presents more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs that demonstrate the deep currents that Surrealism sent through the international art world – and especially through Chicago – since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century. Chicago collectors donated major works by those we now consider “classical” Surrealists, forming an early and continuing collection strength. These artworks also proved inspirational to generations of Chicago-based artists, from the immediate postwar group dubbed the Monster Roster to the Hairy Who and others, a further expression of the continuing lure of “the conjured life” that results in strange, often magical, and sometimes disturbing, imagery. Phyllis Bramson’s work is included in this exhibition.

Museum of Contemporary Art | 220 E. Chicago Ave.; Chicago | www.mcachicago.org
November 21, 2015–June 5, 2016

Gallery walk and conversation about Surrealism's influence with: Phyllis Bramson, Antonio Contro, Buzz Spector and the Curator, Lynne Warren.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016, 6:00 pm.

This in-depth essay delves into Bramson's interest in Henry Darger and how the work, “satisfies my other requirement for art; that the work communicate to the viewer the immediacy and the rich worlds of one’s interior life.”

Click to read more, Painters on Painting.

Rockford Art Museum | 711 N. Main Street; Rockford, IL | www.rockfordartmuseum.org
October 2015–January 2016

Click here to view catalogue.

Curator of Galleries and Exhibitions for Ringling College of Art and Design, Mark Ormond, has brought the exhibition together to celebrate Dean’s curatorial expertise. According to Ormond, “This exhibition will be a tribute to Kevin Dean’s eye as a discriminating curator. It will also help the visitor understand the process of organizing exhibitions. The range of media displayed should provide the viewer with a visual panoply that will transport them to places both familiar and new.”

Ringling College of Art + Design – Selby Gallery | 2700 North Tamiami Trail; Sarasota, FL | www.ringling.edu/selbygallery
February 27–April 4, 2015

In COMP Magazine, an art & design magazine produced by the Art & Design Department at the University of St. Francis, Phyllis discusses her affinity with Chicago, romantic nature, thoughtful and sometimes irrelevant meditation, and why painting is still highly relevant in contemporary art dialogues.

Click to read more, COMP.

Phyllis’s studio in her Greektown loft appears as a collage itself, filled with drawers and portfolios that contain the scraps and images that she layers onto her complex works. Phyllis’s pieces have the quality of a collected chaos, abstracted narratives of fairytales and erotic encounters weaved throughout her large-scale pieces.

INSIDE\WITHIN is a constantly updating web archive devoted to physically exploring the creative spaces of Chicago's emerging and established artists.

Click to read more, INSIDE\WITHIN.

Phyllis Bramson (b. 1941) is something of a beloved artist in Chicago, whose arts community probably has the largest per-capita number of beloved artists of any city. It isn’t hard to understand why. In a metropolis whose major postwar art style was everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Imagism (think Dr. Seuss on LSD), Ms. Bramson’s pictures are influenced by 18th-century French Rococo art and paintings of Chinese “pleasure gardens”; they contain – to condense from the gallery’s press release – conceits about life, miniaturized worlds and fairy tales, and speak about longing, innuendo and clichés.

Getting all of this into paintings of moderate size is a tall order, and to accomplish that with any sort of charm – the strong point of Ms. Bramson’s art – would seem even more difficult. Oddly, it’s a kind of crudity – a deliberately semiclumsy combining of Western realism, Asian fog and flatness, collage and occasional glitter – that does the trick. If Ms. Bramson’s paintings were any slicker, they wouldn’t look as heartfelt as they do.

Phyllis Bramson: Small Personal Dilemmas
Littlejohn Contemporary, 547 W. 27th St., (203) 451-5050
September 3–28, 2013

— Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York

Phyllis Bramson has been selected as one of the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement recipients for 2014. The Lifetime Achievement Awards were first presented in 1979 in President Jimmy Carter’s Oval Office, to Isabel Bishop, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Other notable past honorees include Elizabeth Murray, Howardena Pindell, Suzi Gablik, Nancy Graves, Ellen Lanyon, Louise Bourgeois, and Lee Krasner. Past honorees have represented the full range of distinguished achievement in the visual art professions. This year’s recipients are Harmony Hammond, Adrian Piper, Faith Wilding, and Phyllis Bramson. These awards are part of the Women’s Caucus for Art Annual Conference, held in conjunction with the Annual Conference of the College Art Association (of which the Women’s Caucus for Art is an affiliate group) that will be held in Chicago, February 2014.

The awards recognize the contributions made by women who have distinguished themselves by their activism and commitment to the women’s movement and to the arts. Selections for the Annual Honor Awards for Lifetime Achievement are among the most important actions the WCA takes to increase the recognition of women’s contributions in the visual arts. An illustrated catalogue with a short biography of each recipient and an essay in tribute to each recipient work and ideas, will accompany the award.

Women's Caucus for Art | www.nationalwca.org

Artist Phyllis Bramson is inspired and provoked by the “censoring side” of Henry Darger’s images, particularly the feeling that his images might be often misunderstood or misdirected. In the presentation, she will address how her work and Darger’s art intersect in that regard, and the ways Darger’s concocted inner world has influencing her art making. Presented by Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago

SOFA Chicago 2011 | Room 326, Navy Pier, Festival Hall; Chicago
Sunday, November 6, 2011, 2–3 pm.

“And although abstraction and conceptual art hold greater sway than in the past, figurative painting, often with a surrealist bent, remains vital here. From Henry Darger, Ivan Albright and Seymour Rosofsky to Phyllis Bramson, Wesley Kimler and Kerry James Marshall, the figure is as close to an artistic through-line as there is in the history of Chicago art.”

Click here to read full article.
 

In 1997, at the recommendation of the Art Committee, the Union League Club of Chicago established the Distinguished Artists program. The purpose of the program is to honor select Chicago-area artists for their contributions to both the visual arts and the community. In 2002, the Club extended the program to include authors and musicians. Internationally known, the artists who have been inducted into the program choose to make Chicago their home and continue to contribute to the cultural well-being and world-class status of our community. Some previously honored artists include: Dawoud Bey, Kerry James Marshall, Ed Paschke, Barbara Crane, Michiko Itatani, Iñigo     Manglano-Ovalle, William Conger and Vera Klement. For more information, visit the Union League Club’s Distinguished Artists Program website, www.www.ulcc.org

In Chicago Art Magazine’s “40 over 40” series, they highlighted artists over 40, most of whom occupy the “emerging” or “mid-career” status. The series seeks to challenge the New Museum’s acclaimed “Younger Than Jesus” exhibit, which only allowed artists under the age of 33. The magazine sent out a call for nominations and drew from an internal pool of artists selected by the editors.

To read more, click to read Robin Dluzen’s article, “40 over 40: The Heavy Hitters.”

Further solidifying Nutt’s stature as an internationally significant artist, “Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character” provides an excellent opportunity to expand the artistic framework in which to consider his work beyond Chicago’s Hairy Who. “Seeing Is a Kind of Thinking,” a companion exhibition, includes work by more than 50 contemporary artists that resonates—either formally or through its subject matter—with aspects of Nutt’s work. The exhibition is organized into four thematic sections that examine how artists look to comics, folk art and non-Western art as source material; representations of surrealist psycho-sexual dramas; the traditional portrait bust genre; and an architectural approach to materials that oscillates between 2-D drawings and 3-D forms. Artists represented in the exhibition include: Tomma Abts, Francis Bacon, Enrico Baj, Don Baum, Hans Bellmer, Phyllis Bramson, Victor Brauner, Chuck Close, George Condo, William Copley, Aaron Curry, Dominick Di Meo, Carroll Dunham, Oyvind Fahlstrom, James Falconer, Tony Fitzpatrick, John Graham, Art Green, Leon Golub, Theodore Halkin, Miyoko Ito, Rashid Johnson, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Wifredo Lam, Eric Lebofsky, Fernand Leger, Richard Lindner, Robert Lostutter, Jim Lutes, Rene Magritte, Margherita Manzelli, Kerry James Marshall, Matta, Wangechi Mutu, Bruce Nauman, Rachel Niffenegger, Gladys Nilsson, Paul Nudd, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Lari Pittman, Christina Ramberg, Martin Ramirez, Richard Rezac, Suellen Rocca, Kay Rosen, Peter Saul, Cindy Sherman, Diane Simpson, Steven Urry, Chris Ware, Andy Warhol, H. C. Westermann, Karl Wirsum, Frances Whitehead, Sue Williams, Scottie Wilson, Joseph Yoakum, Ray Yoshida, and Claire Zeisler.

Museum of Contemporary Art | 220 E. Chicago Ave.; Chicago | www.mcachicago.org
January 29–May 29, 2011
 

Anonymous Was a Woman is a grant program focused on supporting individual women artists. The phrase is taken from A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s classic statement of the challenges facing women seeking to create art. With these four words, Woolf succinctly and powerfully evoked the centuries-long struggle of women to gain recognition as artists. Yet there is much more to this innovative grant program than its thought-provoking name. Anonymous Was a Woman was created to fill a national need. In 1995, the National Endowment for the Arts, under intense political pressure, discontinued funding individual artists. This galvanized an unnamed woman artist in New York to take action. “It was obvious there was a need for more private support,” she later wrote. So she used her personal funds to help fill that void. Since 1996, Anonymous Was a Woman has awarded ten grants of $25,000 each per year, except one year when eleven were given. The purpose is to support women visual artists over the age of 45 who are at a critical juncture in their lives or careers. The overriding purpose of the grants is to allow artists to pursue their work. Read more about this organization at their website, www.philanthropyadvisorsny.org

The School of Art Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has instituted the Distinguished Alumni Award given to past alums based on their accomplishments to their field and community. Bramson was selected by the faculty to be one of their first celebrated alums. This award was presented at a reception for alumni during the CAA’s conference held in Chicago, in February 2010.