Beginning in the 1970s, Barbara Bloom has created work in various mediums including photography, installation, film, and books. She is loosely affiliated with a group of artists referred to as The Pictures Generation. Bloom is interested in the value and meaning we collectively and individually bestow upon objects and images. Yet, she has not been concerned with showing single objects or images but, instead, 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, meanings can reverberate and ricochet off each other.

Multimedia artist Barbara Bloom was born in Los Angeles, CA, and lives in New York, NY. She did her undergraduate work at Bennington College in Vermont and received her BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA, where she studied with Conceptual artist John Baldessari.

Bloom has exhibited in multiple solo and group shows at institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; the Luttgenmeijer Gallery, Germany; the Den Haag Sculptuur, The Netherlands; the Galerie Raffaella Cortese, Milan, Italy; the Duolon Museum of Art, Shanghai, China; and the Galerie Pièce Unique, France.

She has garnered numerous awards and honors, including the Visual Arts Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts (2016), the Wynn Newhouse Award (2009), the Artist in Residence Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts (1997), the Venice Biennale Aperto prize for best young artist (1988), the Due Miller Prize (1988), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1989), a Frederick Weisman Foundation Award (1991), and a Wexner Center for the Arts Residency Award (1997). A Getty Research Institute Visiting Scholar in 2007, Bloom has also received numerous fellowships, including the DAAD Berlin Artist Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist’s Fellowship in Photography, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Visual Art.

A monograph of Bloom’s work, The Collections of Barbara Bloom, was published in 2008 by Steidl/International Center for Photography. Designed by the artist, it features essays by Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman. Her recent solo exhibitions include Barbara Bloom: Gold Custody at David Lewis Gallery, East Hampton (2022) and Works on Paper, On Paper at Capitain Petzel in Berlin, Germany (2020).