Phyllis Bramson's work has been exhibited in exhibitions and surveys at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, and Corcoran Gallery of Art.
19 Facts About Phyllis Bramson
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Phyllis Bramson has been widely reviewed and recognized with John S Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundation grants and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, among others.
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Phyllis Bramson was one of the founding members of the early women's art collaborative Artemisia Gallery and a long-time professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, until retiring in 2007.
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Phyllis Bramson was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1941 to parents who ran an auto parts wholesale business.
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Phyllis Bramson earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MA in Painting at the University of Wisconsin, where she created paintings influenced by the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
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Phyllis Bramson appeared in major group shows at the MCA, Art Institute of Chicago, Madison Art Center, and Hyde Park Art Center.
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In 1985, Phyllis Bramson joined the art faculty at the University of Illinois in Chicago, teaching until 2007, when she retired as Professor Emerita.
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Phyllis Bramson acknowledges the pull of 1950s conventions of duty, sacrifice and propriety, describing herself as a kind of tourist or voyeur "teetering" between the worlds of her free-spirited, "anything goes" studio life and straight, married suburban life.
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Dennis Adrian suggested that painting was a place for Phyllis Bramson to explore states of feeling, dreams and fantasies that were otherwise risky, impossible, unacceptable or undesirable.
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Artforum's Colin Westerbeck wrote that Phyllis Bramson's straddling of her private, domestic life and public, artistic one provided insights into the balancing acts required of women that are reflected in her contorted figures acting out exaggerated roles and accommodations to traditional expectations.
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Phyllis Bramson has described herself as "an archetypal 1970s art-school graduate," who abandoned painting in the commonly held belief that it was a "dead" medium.
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Phyllis Bramson explored ceramic, pastel, objects, fans, beads, sequins, glitter and fabric, fashioning doll-like, sculptural portraits, mixed media drawings, and assemblages that some suggest were influenced by her window display work at Marshall Field's.
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In 1980, Phyllis Bramson returned to painting, inspired by an influential exhibition of Phillip Guston's figurative work.
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Phyllis Bramson combines those effects with a decorative impulse using lively patterning, which connects and unifies disparate compositional elements, and creates the "rhythmic dynamism," musicality, and frenetic energy in her paintings.
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Phyllis Bramson worked in a more postmodern fashion in the 1990s, employing collage, appropriation, Rococo pictorial strategies and kitsch elements to a greater degree, and adding more social and cultural commentary to her work.
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Phyllis Bramson combined her own paintings with found fabric, bric-a-brac, lace, decorative moulding, and cut-up elements such as fruits, flowers and jewels from mass-produced shopping-mall paintings, balancing an enigmatic lexicon of collected and invented signs, stylistic and tonal shifts, and far-flung cultural references in increasingly complex, Bosch-like compositions, such as Picturing a Model World.
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Together, the visual elements imply the unfolding and revealing of fantasies and histories of the eclectic cast of characters Phyllis Bramson has borrowed from kitsch and other cultural sources.
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Phyllis Bramson has curated shows at the University of Illinois and the Rockford Art Museum, among others.
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Phyllis Bramson has been recognized with the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the School of Art + Design at University of Illinois at Urbana's Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Distinguished Artist Award from the Union League Club of Chicago.