Joanne Greenbaum

Born 1953, New York 

Known for her lively and colorful abstract paintings, works on paper and sculptures, Joanne Greenbaum has made New York her home since she graduated from Bard College in 1975. The energy and complexity of her compositions often echo the city’s dense grid and its ubiquitous structures : stairways, scaffolding, and even its walls of graffiti. Greenbaum’s drawings and works as a printmaker, evident in the etching on view, carefully balance her skillful control with her intuitive explorations as she follows her layered network of lines into unknown spaces. 

Greenbaum grew up in Westchester but was drawn to the urbanity and culture of the New York City at an early age. Describing herself as a “miserable child and an awkward teenager,” she began spending her Saturdays visiting the Museum of Modern Art and making drawings in a little notebook.

I don’t even know what I was doing there, maybe I wasn’t even looking, but something just sort of seeped in that became my backbone. Maybe it is the same for a lot of people. I think for many people it’s television or films or something else from their childhood that they internalize. I think for me it was Cubism and Surrealism and all of those things.

The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Greenbaum’s work has been widely exhibited by galleries, and collected by museums nationally and abroad. A partial list would include MoMA PS1, New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Haus Konstruktiv Museum, Zurich, and the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf.