Beverly Fishman
Biography
Beverly Fishman (b.1955, Philadelphia, PA) appropriates the forms of pharmaceuticals, fragmenting and recombining the shapes to create larger assemblages – drug cocktails, if you will – that evoke our complex relationships to ideas of sickness and health. Fishman received her MFA (1980) from Yale University and her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art (1977). She has been included in group shows at The Columbus Museum of Art, The Drawing Center in NYC, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her work may be found in the collections of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, East Lansing, MI; MacArthur Foundation Collection, Chicago, IL; Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and elsewhere.
Haystack Perspective
Color is very material to her, often triggering sensations of taste, smell, mood, and emotion. She combines natural and non-natural hues to encourage viewers to think about the ways in which our organic natures have been changed through medical technologies and the capitalist industries in which they are enmeshed. Beverly suggests our contemporary condition offers us both tremendous possibilities and great dangers. She believes that learning how to navigate both aspects of this state of affairs is one of the most pressing issues of our time.