Barbara Bloom

Bloom's use of shadows, traces, Braille, broken objects, partially-obstructed images, watermarks, and micro-images all demonstrate an ongoing interest in visualizing the fragile workings of memory, the invisible, the ephemeral, and the absent. These “aesthetic underdogs, sheltered under Bloom’s wing [...] provide yet another lens for looking at how we seek value in objects and why.”

In conversation with Susan Tallman, Barbara Bloom has referred to herself as a “novelist who somehow ended up in a ‘visual artist’ queue”. Bloom has often compared herself, and the viewer of her work, to a 'detective' who is confronted with disparate clues and is asked to form some kind of visual narrative. Her work is often about the nature of looking. She engages her viewer, seducing him/her into a beautifully constructed visual world, one that is underlaid by subversive wrenches thrown in.

Bloom has an ongoing interest in the value and meaning we collectively and individually bestow upon objects and images. She has not been concerned with showing single objects or images, rather with highlighting the relationships between them, and the meanings implicit in their placement and combination. The objects are placeholders for thoughts, and when they are situated in proximity to one another, meanings can reverberate and ricochet off of each other. Additionally, Bloom states in an artist's statement that her "fascination is with the relationships between objects or images—and the meanings implicit in their placement and combination."

Bloom is a visual artist whose conceptual practice relies mainly on photography and installation. Beginning in the 1970s, Bloom has created work in a variety of different mediums including photography, installation, film, and books.

Bloom attended Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont, from 1968-1969, and in 1972 received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California where her mentor was John Baldessari.

Barbara Bloom (born 1951, in Los Angeles) lives and works in New York City. She is a conceptual artist best known for her multi-media installation works. Bloom is loosely affiliated with a group of artists referred to as The Pictures Generation. For nearly twenty years she lived in Europe, first in Amsterdam then Berlin. Since 1992, she has lived in New York City with her husband, the writer-composer Chris Mann, and their daughter.