Libby Black
The Build Up, 2021
Paper, paint, pencil, and glue
In The Build Up, Libby Black identifies resonant symbols of the domestic sphere: the facsimiles of empty cans, housewares, dirty pots, and laundry prompts the question: Who’s going to clean up? Black’s assemblage brings critique to gender roles and household tensions about the division of labor, matters exacerbated during the pandemic lockdown when more people had to stay home. A successful simulacra of the mundane, The Build Up memorializes the artist’s housebound days and weeks with her wife and their teenage son with humor.
A Toledo, Ohio native, Black earned a BFA in Painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999. Afterward, she decided that she wanted to do her graduate studies in a queer city, and applied to the California College of the Arts. Since finishing her MFA in Painting at CCA in 2001, she has stayed in the Bay Area. While noting that her family has experienced homophobia in the region, Black calls the region “messy”–an adjective that also could be applied to The Build Up. “This place is home,” she has said.
Black is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art at San Francisco State University. She lives with her family in Berkeley.
Photos courtesy of Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
Libby Black is a painter, drawer, and sculptural installation artist living in Berkeley, CA. Her artwork charts a path through personal history and a broader cultural context to explore the intersection of politics, feminism, LGBTQ+ identity, consumerism, addiction, notions of value, and desire. Her sculptural works are to-scale re-creations of objects (some from her own life, some fictional) made of paper, hot glue, and acrylic paint. She arranges these three-dimensional renderings of domestic objects, books, magazines, handbags, and shoes in still-life arrangements, creating hybrids that mix the real and the imaginary. Black also produces two dimensional paintings and drawings based on imagery culled from disparate sources like fashion magazines, newspapers, her own photos, and books. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with such shows as “California Love” at Galerie Droste in Wuppertal, Germany; “Bay Area Now 4” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; “California Biennial” at the Orange County Museum of Art; and at numerous galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Black has been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts; Montalvo Arts Center; and Spaces in Cleveland, OH. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, and The New York Times. She received a BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in 2001. Libby is an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.
