Phyllis Bramson

I live and work in
Chicago,Illinois. I am primarily a painter, but interested in object making and visual tableaus. I am a pink blimp floating in a white cube. A contaminator of theory but respectful of post modern's ability to open up visual strategy and open ended narrative possibilites copresent with abstraction. I believe in the erotic eye, the notion of all senses put on alert. That is what I want my paintings to acheive.

I am a mature artist but still in hot water.


BODY TROUBLE = THE FACTS OF LIFE
I have a deep and abiding interest in narrative painting, as it has always fueled my thoughts and studio practice. My relationship to narration is from a position of the uncanny and the ineffable. My paintings are meant to instruct, move, provoke and disturb. In other words the work should inject itself internally into the viewers psyche. Lately I have been using collage less and painting more, still remaining a lover of sumptuous surface, invested in a convoluted narrative and a painting language all my own.

I am perfectly comfortable with the description that my paintings project a capricious irritability and deception for I want them to be willfully fantastic and edgy. On the surface they...

EDUCATION
1962Yale University, Yale/Norfolk Art Scholarship (summer)
1963BFA in Drawing and Painting, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, Awarded High Honors
1964MA in Painting, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, Vilas Fellowship
1974MFA, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL

Professor Emeritus of Studio Arts 1972, University of Illinois/ Chicago, Department of Art & Design, Presently advising MFA drawing and painting students at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago

GRANTS
1976National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grand/Crafts
1980Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant
1981Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Grant
1983National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant/Painting
1988Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Grant
Senior Fulbright Scholar-Australia
1993John Simon Guggenheim Grant
Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, New York City Studio Grant
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant/Printmaking
1996Vermont Studio Center Residency/Grant
1997The Rockefeller Foundation Residency/Grant (Bellagio, Italy)
2000Illinois Project Completion Grant
2002 Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, Grants-in- Aid Award
2003 Institute ...

2010 Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL, Phyllis Bramson and Judith Geichman (two-person exhibition)

2008 "Love, Kisses, Tears (and heartache)" Philip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO. (one-person exhibition)

2008 Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, NY, "Kerfuffles" (one-person exhibition)

2010 Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery of San Jose State University (James Yood, guest curator), San Jose, CA, "Chicago Imagism(s)" (group exhibition)