biography
Beth Grabowski is an artist and educator. Her work has been represented widely in national and international venues, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Art Helix in Brooklyn, NY, Racine Art Museum, Guanlan Printmaking Museum in Shenzhen, China, and the Câmara Municipal de Alijo, Portugal. She has held several artist residencies including at Proyecto Ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Art Print Residence in Barcelona, Spain, the Sanbao Ceramics Institute in Jingdezhen, China and the Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium. Grabowski is a three-time recipient of support from the North Carolina Arts Council (two Artist Fellowships and a Project Grant.) Grabowski is the Kappa, Kappa Gamma Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill where she has taught printmaking and book arts since 1985. She is co-author, with Bill Fick, of Printmaking, A Complete Guide to Materials and Processes, published by Laurence King of London. The first edition was released in 2009, and a second edition in the summer of 2015. Since 1987, she has been involved with SGC International, the largest professional organization for print artists, educators, collectors and enthusiasts, serving as its president of from 2012-2014.
artist's statement
MY WORK FROM THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS has been motivated by the idea of a contemporary nostalgia. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, the late Svetlana Boym proposed this concept of a contemporary nostalgia as a longing for coherency borne more of an apprehension of an uncertain future rather than a sentimental desire for a past. It is a phenomenon particular to contemporary life and reflects a sense of foreboding that puts our capacity for self-determination at risk. Forces beyond individual control buffet us around, but in a paradoxical twist, also unite us. From this perspective, nostalgia’s desire is for a more contained and controllable sense of the world.
I find it fascinating that Boym’s historical emotion –existing as a vicarious longing– is strangely enabled by our technological age. We sit at our computers, and see the world. We imagine ourselves to experience, and possibly empathy. We are simultaneously inconsequential and connected.
I like to think of the nostalgic impulse as Boym describes it as “not always retrospective; (but)… prospective as well. …(N)ostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.”[1] Nostalgia holds out hope for a return—or at least reclamation of agency—perhaps as we can only understand in hindsight. As long as the possibility of experience—however remote—exists, then the understanding of our collective responsibility becomes tangible.
I have responded to such paradox in a variety of ways. My fascination with language and communication is often based more on what is unsaid than said. Residual, excerpted and layered texts and images exist as visual metaphor for the imperfect understanding that results from our struggle for comprehension. This aim is considerably more difficult when confronted with mutually exclusive sentiments and complicated by flawed acts of memory. Processes that invite dislocation, altered emphasis and recombination exist as strategies to aid in communicating a sense of desire for empathy when faced with reconciling conflicting points of view.
[1] Svetlana Boym, Nostalgia and its Discontents, The Hedgehog Review / Summer 2007, p 8
I find it fascinating that Boym’s historical emotion –existing as a vicarious longing– is strangely enabled by our technological age. We sit at our computers, and see the world. We imagine ourselves to experience, and possibly empathy. We are simultaneously inconsequential and connected.
I like to think of the nostalgic impulse as Boym describes it as “not always retrospective; (but)… prospective as well. …(N)ostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.”[1] Nostalgia holds out hope for a return—or at least reclamation of agency—perhaps as we can only understand in hindsight. As long as the possibility of experience—however remote—exists, then the understanding of our collective responsibility becomes tangible.
I have responded to such paradox in a variety of ways. My fascination with language and communication is often based more on what is unsaid than said. Residual, excerpted and layered texts and images exist as visual metaphor for the imperfect understanding that results from our struggle for comprehension. This aim is considerably more difficult when confronted with mutually exclusive sentiments and complicated by flawed acts of memory. Processes that invite dislocation, altered emphasis and recombination exist as strategies to aid in communicating a sense of desire for empathy when faced with reconciling conflicting points of view.
[1] Svetlana Boym, Nostalgia and its Discontents, The Hedgehog Review / Summer 2007, p 8