Linda Weintraub | |
|---|---|
 Weintraub in Speaking Portraits | |
| Born | Linda Abraham Elizabeth, NJ, USA |
| Occupation | Art writer, educator, curator, artist |
| Nationality | American |
Linda Weintraub is an American art writer, educator and curator. She has written several books on contemporary art.[1] Her most recent works address environmental consciousness that defines the ways cultures approach art, science, ethics, philosophy, politics, manufacturing, and architecture.[2][3][4][5]
Weintraub lives in Rhinebeck, New York.[6][7] She received a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters of Fine Arts at Douglass College Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Weintraub is an educator having taught at The New School,[8] Muhlenberg College, Cedar Crest College, Lafayette College, State University of New York at New Paltz, and the Hartford Art School Interdisciplinary Master of Fine Arts Program at Hartford University. During 1982-1992 she was the Director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute at Bard College. At Oberlin College Weintraub held the position of the Henry R. Luce Professor in the Emerging Arts, where she founded an interdisciplinary arts program.[9][10] She has lectured widely on the topic of contemporary art practice, environmental and ecological art.[11] Weintraub is the Director of Artnow Publications, an enterprise devoted to applying ecological parameters for the material production of books produced using environmentally responsible processes. She designed and manages a sustainable permaculture homestead. Her hand-made home was built out of recycled cars, and is geothermally heated and cooled.[12]
Weintraub's most recent book, To Life!: Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet[13] chronicles the emerging EcoArt discipline, examining a range of artistic responses to environmental issues and concerns. This book is the first international survey of 20th and 21st century artists who tackle and transform complex global problems that effect humankind other species and ecological systems.[14] This historical and pedagogical text fosters awareness in the next generation of interdisciplinary artists: students of art, design, environmental studies and environmental science to integrate responsible behaviors and activism into their personal and professional lives.[15][16] Weintraub has also authored In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists[17][18] in which she examines the conceptual and practical "ways of making" as deployed by forty contemporary artists. Her book, Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society offers an introduction and overview of vanguard art practices.[19][20][21][22]
Weintraub originated over fifty exhibitions while serving as the director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute at Bard College and while serving as the Director of the Philip Johnson Center for the Arts, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania. Recent exhibitions include: Dear Mother Nature at the Dorsky Museum, SUNY New Paltz she curated Dear Mother Nature.[23] Smaller Footprints: Women Respond to Climate Change, for MOAH Ceder and WEAD (Women's Environmental Artists Directory); Rally Round the Flag of Justice, for Redline Contemporary Art Center in Denver, Colorado. Other exhibitions Weintraub has curated include Lo and Behold: Visionary Art in the Post-Modern Era, Process and Product: The Making of Eight Contemporary Masterworks,[24] Landmarks: New Site Proposals by Twenty Pioneers of Environmental Art,[25] Art What Thou Eat: Images of Food in American Art, and The Maximal Implications of the Minimal Line, "Is it Art?.[26]
"An Interview with Linda Weintraub – Curator of "Dear Mother Nature: Hudson Valley Artists 2012" at The Dorsky by Claire Lambe"
Artist Linda Weintraub and Michael Asbill Discuss Weintraub's Participatory Art Show Archived 2017-02-20 at the Wayback Machine. WGXQ Radio feature story.[28]
Weintraub has had a solo exhibition, entitled "Grandmother Earth" at the CHRCH Project Space in Cottekill, New York. The participatory sculptural installation took the form of a large altar-like structure on the wall and floor of the gallery, made from organic matter from local woods—seeds, mushrooms, acorns, bark, twigs, bones, shells, moss, clay, and lichens. Throughout the course of the exhibition, viewers including were invited to enlarge and expand upon the artwork by contributing their own one-foot square additions.[29][30] She has exhibited in group exhibitions: "Water. Water." show at Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, NY; "Value of Food" at St. John the Divine Cathedral, New York, NY; "Food Shed" at Smack Melon Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, traveling to the CRC20 Gallery in Linlithgo, New York. Her work has also been featured at the Athens Cultural Center, Athens, New York, and the Times Center in New York City.
