Joan Livingstone

Joan Livingstone embraces the physical and material in sculptural objects, installations, prints and collages. Her abstracted forms reference the human organism and bodily experience, questioning contemporary issues of intimacy, sexuality, and desire. Both hard and soft, whole and fragmented, Livingstone’s provocative works contain, leak, posture, and droop, asking us to re-consider our knowledge of self and body in relation to time, nature and culture. Pliable surfaces of cloth and skin, examined through a cultural history of textile, at once expose and obscure, respond to touch, movement and gravity, and become metaphors for the complexities of human identity. Utilizing membranes of wool, felt, rubber, leather and cloth––intensively pieced, stitched, and frequently in conjunction with resins and thermoplastic substances––Livingstone develops relationships of forms that evoke somatic memory and psychological tension, underscoring the persistence of the erotic. Aligned with the work of Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and Doris Salcedo, Livingstone’s practice extends a dialog confronting our notions of human experience.

Livingstone’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City) the Kanazawa Museum of Art (Japan), the Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art (Korea), the Boise Art Museum (Idaho), the Arkansas Art Center , the Dennos Museum Center (Michigan), and the Chicago Cultural Center. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Boise Museum of Art (Idaho), the Contemporary Museum (Hawaii), Detroit Institute of Arts (Michigan), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the Racine Art Museum (Wisconsin).

She is currently Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Portland, Oregon she maintains a studio practice in an industrial neighborhood in Chicago.