Beverly Fishman (American, b. 1955) adopts the language of abstraction to explore the body, issues of identity, and contemporary culture. For more than three decades, she has used imagery drawn from science, medicine, and the pharmaceutical industry to promote inquiry into the effects of these institutions on both individuals and societies. She writes, “I mine the histories of geometric and hard-edge abstraction and pop art; and I reconfigure them through strategies of appropriation and references to both living bodies and seductive objects. Thereby, I hope to provoke reflection on both art and society in an increasingly anxious, addicted, and divided time.”
Fishman’s work has been the subject of over thirty-five solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Thessaloniki, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Detroit, and her work has also been the subject of exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, among others. She is the recipient of many awards, including the National Academy of Design Academician Award, Anonymous was a Woman Award, the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award; an Artist Space Exhibition Grant; and an NEA Fellowship Grant, among others. Fishman received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1977 from the Philadelphia College of Art, and her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1980 from Yale University. Between 1992 and 2019, she was Artist-in-Residence and Head of Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. She lives and works in Detroit.
