Beverly Fishman (58-59) is a painter and sculptor whose work explores science, medicine, and the body. She is a Guggenheim Fellow; a National Academy of Design Academician; an Anonymous Was a Woman awardee; and Artist-in-Residence at Cranbrook Academy of Art between 1992 and 2019, where she was Head of the Painting Department. Although best known for her painted reliefs based on the forms of drugs and pharmaceuticals, Fishman has consistently worked in multiple media, such as cast-resin and glass sculpture, as well as silkscreen painting on metal, large-scale wall painting, and outdoor murals
— Wikipedia
Quote: “Yes, I intend for my paintings to be subversive — but I don’t see them as only subversive. I want you to think about the seductive nature of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the purist and transcendental language of high modernism, when you look at them. Both can be dangerous. The pharmaceutical industry creates medical issues to sell us more drugs than we need. High modernism can overemphasize autonomy and art’s separation from the world.
“But while I am suspicious of both these entities, I reject neither drugs nor the modernist tradition. Pharmaceuticals help millions of people. And though I may disagree with certain modernist ideals — for example, the purity of the medium, or the radical separation of abstraction from representation — I’m still taken with the abstraction of [Frank] Stella.”
— Art in America
Learn more about Beverly Fishman from Wikipedia. ►
Watch “Beverly Fishman Review: Arts Magazine” [2:21]. ►
Watch “The Society for Contemporary Art presents Beverly Fishman” [1:11:19]. ►
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