Libby Black
Biography
Libby Black is a painter, drawer and sculptural installation artist living in Berkeley, CA. Her artwork charts a path through personal history and a broader cultural context to explore the intersection of politics, feminism, LGBTQ+ identity, consumerism, addiction, notions of value and desire. Her sculptural works are to-scale re-creations of objects (some from her own life, some fictional) made of paper, hot glue and acrylic paint. She arranges these three-dimensional renderings of domestic objects, books, magazines, handbags and shoes in still-life arrangements, creating hybrids that mix the real and the imaginary. Black also produces two-dimensional paintings and drawings based on imagery culled from disparate sources like fashion magazines, newspapers and books. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with such shows as “California Love” at Galerie Droste in Wuppertal, Germany; “Bay Area Now 4” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; “California Biennial” at the Orange County Museum of Art; and at numerous galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Black has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts; Montalvo Arts Center; and Spaces in Cleveland, OH. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, and The New York Times. She received a B.F.A. from Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999 and an M.F.A. at the California College of the Arts in 2001. Libby is an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.