Nationality American Name Cynthia Carlson | Known for painting Role Visual artist | |
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Born 1942 (age 72–73) Chicago, Illinois Website www.cynthiacarlsonartist.com Books Cynthia Carlson: Installations, 1979-1989 (a Decade, More Or Less) : March 14-April 23, 1989, Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania | ||
[Art Preview] Beyond the Rectangle: Works by Cynthia Carlson and Byoung Ok Min
Cynthia Carlson (born 1942) is an American visual artist, living and working in New York.
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Personal life and education
Carlson was born in 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago and then attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BFA in 1965. She moved to New York City and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, graduating with her MFA in 1967. She is married to Robert Gino Bertoletti.
Career
In the 1960s, Carlson's art was influenced by the work of The Hairy Who and Chicago Imagists artists in Chicago early on. Later, during the 1970s, she was a pioneer of the “Pattern and Decoration” group in New York City, in which the Feminist movement played an important role. Mainly a painter, her work has evolved within a number of different stylistic concerns including installation, sculpture, and public art commissions.
Carlson's career has included nine solo museum exhibitions and forty-seven one woman exhibits, including galleries in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. She has had several public art commissions, and numerous group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the US, Canada and Europe. In 1977, she was invited to participate in a sculpture exhibition at Artpark, in Lewiston NY, where she built and decorated a life sized gingerbread house, 13-feet high.
She taught for 40 years, first at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and later at Queens College, CUNY, where she is Professor Emeritus. She also served for more than twenty years on the Artist Advisory Committee of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. She has lived in Italy for a year at a time on several occasions, as well as traveling extensively in Europe and elsewhere.
In the early 70s, for several years, she traveled throughout the United States documenting Environmental Folk Art and lectured extensively on the material. In 2012, she donated the entire collection of visuals and documents to the L’Art Brut Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.