Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist Lecture: Erika Blumenfeld

Erika Blumenfeld, the spring 2021 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist, will discuss her work in a public lecture. Both her residency and her lecture will take place remotely.

Blumenfeld (b. 1971, USA) is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice is motivated by the wonder of natural phenomena and the relationship between nature and culture. Blumenfeld approaches her work like an archivist, driven by a passion to trace and collect the evidence and stories of connection across the cosmos. Her non-traditional research-based practice has led her to examine a range of subjects including astronomy, geology, planetary science, ecology, the environment, anthropogenic climate disruption, natural night sky preservation, and light in its many forms. Blumenfeld often works in collaboration with scientists and research institutions, including NASA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, McDonald Observatory, and the South African National Antarctic Program. The photo- and video-based works, installations, paintings, drawings, sculptures, writing, and data science visualizations that result from her artistic investigations are the artifacts that depict her inquiries’ reflections and weave an equally conceptual and formalist intent.

Blumenfeld is a Guggenheim Fellow, Smithsonian Fellow, and recipient of a Rauschenberg Foundation Artist-in-Residence, a NASA research grant, and a Creative Capital Award. She has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including the Albright Knox Art Gallery, New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Nevada Museum of Art, Ballroom Marfa, Färgfabriken Norr, Galerie der Stadt Mainz, Kunstnernes Hus, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Rice University, and TATE Modern, among others. Her work is featured in many books and publications, including Art and Ecology Now (Thames & Hudson, 2014) and The Polaroid Book (Taschen eds. 2005 & 2008) and resides in national and international permanent collections such as Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Lannan Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, New Mexico Museum of Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and University of Texas at Austin (McDonald Observatory Collection). Blumenfeld is currently an artist-in-residence at NASA, where she is leading a team to create Astromaterials 3D, the newly launched interactive virtual library of NASA’s Apollo Lunar and Antarctic Meteorite collections for researchers and the public. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.