Kimberly Brooks
Born
Kimberly Shlain

New York City, New York, U.S.
Alma mater
StyleContemporary, abstract, realist
Spouse
​
(m. 1997)​
Children2
Parent
Relatives
Websitewww.kimberlybrooks.com

Kimberly Brooks (née Shlain) is an American artist and author. Her work blends figuration and abstraction with a focus on subjects related to memory, reality, history, representation, and identity.[1][2]

Early life and education

Born in New York City as Kimberly Shlain, she is the daughter of Leonard Shlain and Carol (nee) Lewis. She grew up in Mill Valley, California. There she studied sculpture, drawing, and painting as a child.[3] She attended UC Berkeley and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in literature. Following her graduation, she spent a year in Paris and attended the Sorbonne. She later studied painting at UCLA and Otis College of Art and Design.[2]

Work

Painting and multimedia

Brooks' first solo exhibition, The Whole Story, was held at the Risk Press Gallery in Los Angeles in 2006. It featured a series of segmented paintings which investigated the role of women as artists and models. Brooks used erotic imagery and fragmentation to examine the historical glorification of women's bodies to present the female image within a feminist representation.[4][5]

Brooks' second solo show, Mom's Friends, explored feminism of the early 1960s and 1970s. The paintings were based on her mother and her friends in Marin County, California. In addition to original photographs, Brooks shot recreations, using friends and models in vintage clothing.

In 2008, Brooks' exhibited Technicolor Summer. She began work on Technicolor Summer after her father was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and wrote on the subject "every moment was more vivid because it could be the last one. It was a summer in high definition. A summer in technicolor." These paintings aimed to convey qualities of old photographs.[5]

After attending a talk at LACMA about Elsa Schiaparelli's and Coco Chanel's influence on the paintings of Henri Matisse, Brooks began a project creating portraits of well-known costume and fashion designers, and stylists, titled The Style Project. This looked at ideas of personal style and trends in popular fashion, using photos of her subjects in their own environments as reference to the paintings.[2] Themes around female beauty and fashion continue with Thread in 2011, and in 2014, she had two solo shows; I See People Disappear and I Have A King Who Does Not Speak.[6]

In 2015, Brooks' 8-foot-tall uncoated steel pendant, "The Ephemerality of Manner," was permanently acquired by the Cooper Building in Los Angeles' Fashion District. Using video, collage work, textile pieces, and welded steel, it was created as part of her site-specific installation "Thread and Bone." The Los Angeles Times wrote that the sculpture was "shot through with subtle complexities and contradictions traversing fashion, feminism, architecture and art history."[7]

In September 2017, the Zevitas Marcus Gallery in Los Angeles presented Brazen, a solo exhibition of paintings Brooks began working on after the 2016 American presidential election.[8] Brooks used silver and gold leaf to create paintings that incorporate religious icons, grand interiors and ornamentation.

Teaching, writing, speaking

Between 2007 and 2009, Brooks interviewed artists and contributed more than 70 essays about art for First Person Artist, her weekly column in The Huffington Post. She founded the Huffington Post Arts section in 2010 and its Science section in 2011.[9][10] In 2011, she presented "The Creative Process in Eight Stages" at a TEDx conference.

Personal life

Brooks lives in Los Angeles, and works out of a studio in Venice, California. She and her husband, Albert Brooks married in 1997.[11] Together they have two children. Following her father's death, Brooks and her siblings, Tiffany Shlain and Jordan Shlain, worked together to edit the manuscript of his final book, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius.[2][3][12]

Solo exhibitions, publications and installations

  • 2018 Brazen: A Painting and Poetry Collection, Edited by Keith Martin. Poets Brandon Constantine, Richard Ferguson, Luivette Resto and Marie Marandola contribute poems inspired by paintings of Kimberly Brooks. Published by Griffith Moon.
  • 2018 Mid Career Survey, Mt San Antonio College, Walnut, CA
  • 2015 Thread and Bone, the Cooper Building, Los Angeles, California
  • 2014 I Have A King Who Does Not Speak Roosevelt Library, San Antonio, Texas

References

  1. ↑ Scovell, Nell (March 11, 2014). "Kimberly Brooks's Mesmerizing Oil Paintings". Vanity Fair. Archived from the original on January 28, 2017. Retrieved December 28, 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Namkung, Victoria (February 21, 2010). "Portraits in style". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on September 9, 2015. Retrieved December 30, 2016.
  3. 1 2 Himmelstein, Drew (October 30, 2014). "Final chapter: Children fulfill dad's dying wish with publication of his book". J Weekly. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved December 30, 2016.
  4. ↑ Engleberg, Keren (May 26, 2006). "7 Days in The Arts". Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
  5. 1 2 Beil, Kim (June 2008). "Technicolor Summer". art ltd. Archived from the original on December 12, 2020. Retrieved December 30, 2016.
  6. ↑ Bennet, Steve (December 1, 2014). "Brooks allows viewers to fill in details in her opulent paintings". San Antonio Express. Archived from the original on February 3, 2017. Retrieved December 30, 2016.
  7. ↑ Vankin, Deborah (June 11, 2015). "Kimberly Brooks: Fashionable sculpture for historic Cooper building". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on February 19, 2016. Retrieved December 30, 2016.
  8. ↑ "Editorial Previews: Kimberly Brooks". www.visualartsource.com. Archived from the original on May 9, 2018. Retrieved May 9, 2018.
  9. ↑ "Ted X events". TED. Archived from the original on January 26, 2018. Retrieved February 1, 2017.
  10. ↑ "Kimberly Brooks". Huffington Post. Archived from the original on February 18, 2017. Retrieved February 1, 2017.
  11. ↑ Steger, Pat (March 17, 1997). "Bridegroom Was There Directly / Filmmaker Brooks gets hitched here". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on March 4, 2018. Retrieved March 4, 2018.
  12. ↑ Rochlin, Margy (August 22, 1999). "A Funnyman Whose Muse is in the Mirror". The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 12, 2017. Retrieved July 10, 2017.
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