Each year the School of Fine Arts makes every effort to bring in a national or internationally known Visiting Artist as the featured artist of our Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Fortunately, internationally renowned artist, Judy Pfaff, has agreed to come to Indiana University on March 5, 2010 to present a lecture on her creative work in the fields of installation art, sculpture, theater sets, printmaking and works on paper. This will be a very exciting and engaging lecture owing to the dynamic and innovative nature of Ms. Pfaff’s installations and sculpture and the beauty and sophistication of her prints and works on paper. Judy Pfaff’s work is included in the book, After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art, which features the work of twelve of the leading woman artists of the 20th century. Ms. Pfaff has also agreed to do a day of critiques of the work of the MFA students in the School of Fine Arts on March 6th.

Judy Pfaff was born in London, England in 1946. She received a BFA from Washington University, Saint Louis (1971) and an MFA from Yale University (1973). “Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between the two- and three-dimensional. Pfaff’s site-specific installations pierce through walls and careen through the air, achieving lightness and explosive energy. Pfaff’s work is a complex ordering of visual information composed of steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and natural elements such as tree roots. She has extended her interest in natural motifs in a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations, and has developed her dramatic sculptural materials into set designs for several theatrical stage productions”—(PBS). Pfaff has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2004); a Bessie (1984); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1986). She has had major exhibitions at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison (2002); Denver Art Museum (1994); St. Louis Art Museum (1989); and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1982). The Museum of Modern Art 1984, Whitney Bienial. 1975, 81, 87. Pfaff represented the United States in the 1998 São Paolo Bienal. Her work can be found in such prestigious collections as the Detroit Institute of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Pfaff lives and works in Brooklyn and Tivoli, New York. You may view her work at her Web site www.judypfaff.org, at one of her galleries at www.ameringer-yohe.com, and her many fine prints are represented at www.tandempress.wisc.edu.