Meant to elicit quick, intuitive responses, Short Answer Sunday will introduce readers to a wide variety of artists, educators, writers, curators, art enthusiasts and art adjacent individuals whose inclinations I admire. With the intent of getting to know the person behind the artwork as well generating new avenues to artistic discovery, participants may respond with only a few words or an artist’s name, always with the opportunity to elaborate if they wish!
Ladies!* This week, I’m super psyched to share a Short Answer Sunday with Barbara Weissberger. I was introduced to Barbara’s work when we were both included in a group show at Ada Gallery last year, and then I got to see her absolutely stunning solo show “Potato Poems” at the gallery in February. I’ve noted over the years that I feel intensely drawn to photographic imagery when it crosses into the world of sculpture, and Barbara’s quilted collages are no exception (although they are obviously exceptional).
In her recent work, Barbara combines photographs printed on fabric with a whole host of other materials, including but not limited to: jeans, bras, thread, grommets. Though wall-based, their quirky, irregular silhouettes place them in the world of objects for me, as do the many small sprouts of thread that protrude out of the surface like errant hairs (a detail that you might miss if viewing on the screen). While the human body may not be overtly present, the cropped and fragmented images of potatoes (or other household items) stand in as surrogates. Similarly evocative of absent humans, many of the fabrics retain a contextual reminder that they were once intimately worn by somebody, somewhere. Although maybe tinged with sadness (I like my feelings complex and nuanced), they're also silly, obsessive, sensitive, beautiful and I love the way Barbara’s work transforms the ordinary into the unexpected. I’m reminded that a sense of absurdity is one of my favorite characteristics in an artwork (in people, too, tbh) and Barbara’s work has this in abundance.
Of course, Barbara’s Short Answer Sunday is as smart, fantastic and fun as her work, so get to it! For more about Barbara Weissberger, find her on her website and Instagram.
xo, Lauren
*using this as a gender neutral
Name: Barbara Weissberger
Occupation: Artist / Teaching Professor Emerita
Astrological data: The one with scales
Hometown: Pittsburgh
Current location: Montana (my sometimes hometown)
Other than Instagram, how do you find new-to-you artists?
Galleries and museums, art press, friends
An artwork that makes you laugh?
Almost any Fischli and Weiss
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| FISCHLI/WEISS, Quiet Afternoon,1984, C-print 11⅞ × 8 inches Image Source |
An artwork that makes you cry?
Most underrated artist?
Too many to name just one but I’ll say Helen Chadwick
An artwork that you’d like to live inside for a week?
An artist whose work you can’t stop thinking about?
Lately Tony Feher
An artwork that feels like a warm hug?
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| Dorothea Tanning, Étreinte, 1969, Wool flannel and fake fur stuffed with wool, 2 parts: 40 x 40 1/2 x 19 in. and 40 x 19 x 13 in. Image Source |
What’s your favorite characteristic in an artwork?
Ridiculous, smart, heady, and embodied, all at the same time
Erotic artwork? (Ed. note: this is a multiple choice question)
Yes: ✅
What’s an artwork that doesn’t look like art?
Perhaps easier to say what is a not-artwork that looks like art
What’s an artwork that you suspect that you shouldn’t like, but you do (guilty pleasure)?
What’s an artwork that you secretly hate?
I can’t say because many of the artworks I have hated I came to love years later
Most insane art piece?
Jay DeFeo’s Chance Landscape or any of the pieces that come out of her obsession with her dental bridge. Also, my obsession with her obsession with her dental bridge.
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| Jay deFeo, Traveling Portrait (Chance Landscape), 1974, photo collage with acrylic and glue on paperboard, 14 1/2 x 19 inches Image Source |
Fav monograph or art book?
That’s a tough one, so many, Philip Guston Now
Fav museum or gallery in your current location?
Tinworks Art, an incredible non-profit space in Bozeman
Last exhibition you saw irl?
Museum: Marcel Duchamp, MoMA
Gallery: Fellowship 26, Silver Eye
An artwork that packs a spiritual punch?
Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa
An artwork that you’d like to see before you die?
Velázquez, Las Meninas. And I’d like to have a chance to wear Lygia Clark’s Óculos
What art material do you love to nerd out on?
So many. Right now, blue jeans that I source from thrift stores for my photoquilts
What was the last thing that you listened to in the studio?
My white noise machine
What’s a book that changed your life?
What song, book, podcast or film do you think everyone should know about?
Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field, especially the opening poem, Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
❤
Barbara Weissberger lives and works in Pittsburgh and sometimes in Montana. Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous residencies including MacDowell, Yaddo, Ragdale, Bogliasco, Camargo, the Drawing Center Open Sessions, Ucross, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Montana Artists Refuge. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as PS1/MoMA, White Columns, The Drawing Center, Project Artspace, PS 122, NYC; ADA Gallery, Richmond; Catskill Artspace, Livingston Manor; Hallwalls, Buffalo; Gridspace, Brooklyn; Silver Eye, The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; and The Missoula Art Museum, Missoula. Media includes Fraction Magazine, Femme Art Review and The Heavy Collective. Her poetry has appeared in Contact Sheet and is forthcoming in Salt Hill. She is part of the collaborative duo ALDRICH + WEISSBERGER. She received an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute and is Teaching Professor Emerita at the University of Pittsburgh
For more on Barbara Weissberger, go to her website and find her on Instagram.
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