Barbara Grad

Barbara Grad (born 1950) is an American artist and educator, known for abstract, fractured landscape paintings, which combine organic and geometric forms, colliding planes and patterns, and multiple perspectives.

Her work's themes include the instability of experience, the ephemerality of nature, and the complexity of navigating cultural environments in flux.

While best known as a painter, Grad also produces drawings, prints, mixed-media works and artist books.

She has exhibited in venues including the Art Institute of Chicago, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Danforth Art, Rose Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art and A.I.R., and been reviewed in publications, including Artforum, Arts Magazine and ARTnews.

Grad was born Barbara Janet Horwitz in Chicago, Illinois in 1950.

She studied painting, as well as photography, drawing, printmaking and art history, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; artist and painter Ray Yoshida and art historian Whitney Halstead were strong influences.

Grad emerged amid a period of intense artistic activity in Chicago in the early 1970s, alongside new gallery districts, critical voices, alternative art spaces, and the Chicago Imagists.

She credits that time, and teachers like Yoshida, with sparking her interest in Outsider artists with a personal vision, such as Joseph Yoakum and Lee Godie, who continue to influence her.

Grad incorporated those influences alongside modernists like Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, and Bay Area Painters such as David Park.

She generally rejects explicit imagery in favor of invented spaces that she creates with paint and color, which serve as metaphors for the complexity and instability of experience, culture and the environment.

Grad is often highly influenced by her environment.

For a three-year period in the late 1970s, she commuted from Indiana to Chicago in a small plane, drawing aerial views on the trips.

In 1972, she completed her BFA and married Sheldon Grad (divorced, 1973); she earned an MFA there in 1975.

Grad co-founded Artemisia Gallery, one the country's first women-artist collectives, in Chicago in 1973.

She has been an educator for over four decades, most notably at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

While in school, Grad exhibited at the Artemisia, Allan Frumkin and Nancy Lurie galleries, and in the Art Institute of Chicago's prestigious "Artists of Chicago and Vicinity" shows (1973, 1975).

She also began teaching part-time at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1974).

In 1976, Grad took a full-time teaching position at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

The imagery found its way into her work—and continues to—in ribbon-like bands of modulated color and patterning that suggested landscapes and plant forms, which she sometimes combined with geometric shapes, as in the painting, Trails (1978).

This work, which she exhibited at Artemisia and Jan Cicero Gallery, included paintings and mixed-media pieces that sometimes incorporated weaving.

When she tired of small-town life in 1979, she moved into a cheap loft in the "flower district" on the outskirts of current-day Chelsea in New York City, continuing to exhibit in Chicago and nationally.

After moving to New York in 1979, Grad began explored imagery from her new surroundings—cityscapes, street life, pinball machines, the figure—in more representational paintings that she exhibited at 55 Mercer Gallery in New York and Jan Cicero in Chicago.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Grad returned to nature, and eventually, abstraction, influenced by her commutes to Boston and move to more pastoral Wayland, Massachusetts in 1991.

Art historian Bonnie Grad (no relation) wrote that this new work "transports viewers to a primordial natural world of incipient becoming."

In 1981, she joined the full-time faculty at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she remained until retiring as Professor Emerita in 2015.

Grad has been based in the Boston area since 1987.

Grad's work is noted for its loose, painterly invented spaces, lush color, and ability to conjure wide-ranging allusions to land and seascapes, urban sprawl, or ecological concerns.

She commuted from New York until 1987, when she moved to Boston and married Peter Allen; three years later their son, Samuel, was born.

In subsequent decades, Grad has had notable solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Danforth Art, the Bernard Toale, Howard Yezerski and Miller Yezerski galleries (Boston), and Findlay Galleries (New York and Palm Beach).

Grad lives with her husband and works in Wayland, Massachusetts, outside of Boston.

Her first solo exhibition in Boston (Bernard Toale, 1996) was a synthesis of her travel and nature experiences and her sophisticated integration of abstraction and referential imagery.

These new paintings, such as Fruit of the Vine (1996), employed autumnal washes of loose, patchwork grids that formed fractured, Cubist pictorial spaces, onto which she layered lyrical, rhythmic plays of biomorphic shapes, resembling seeds, pods, ferns or branches about to blossom or fruit.

She unified the compositions by overlaying heavy, map-like white and black line work suggesting tendrils, vessels and honeycombs, which brought the organic forms into focus.

Critics noted the work's lush depths and handling of paint, which appeared both spontaneous and controlled.

Artforum's, Francine Koslow-Miller compared the "primitive stylizations and pictographic lines" to the work of Adolph Gottlieb.

Nancy Stapen of ARTnews wrote that the work recalled the "circular, fertile forms" of Lee Krasner and "the lyricism of Arthur Dove and the impassioned vision of Marsden Hartley," but marked Grad's shift in emphasis from modernist essential forms to fleeting depictions of air, light, the passing of seasons, and "nature's ceaseless flux."

Grad has produced drawings, prints and mixed media art throughout her career.

Her drawing exhibition at Bernard Toale (2000) featured painterly watercolor and ink works on mylar and paper, that mixed text, abstract shapes and a detailed, "secret" visual language reminiscent of Klee or Miró.

Describing the 2016 Grad show "Off Road," The Boston Globe's Cate McQuaid observed, "Grad paints energy and movement, not things. [Her] stripes, colors, and crashing forms conveying urgency as she places us on the precipice of chaos."

In 2018, critic John Yau wrote that Grad's "patterns and striations evoke watery reflections and geological strata, tilled land and strip mines, without shedding their identity as abstract, painterly marks. […] She evokes a world undergoing myriad changes, from the incremental and unavoidable to the deliberate and cataclysmic."