Judy Pfaff

Judy Pfaff (born 1946 in London, England), is an American artist, known mainly for Installation art. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2004) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1986). Major exhibitions have been held of her work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2002), Denver Art Museum (1994) and Saint Louis Art Museum (1989). In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early life and education

Pfaff comes from a working-class background. Her father, a Royal Air Force pilot, was absent from her life. Pfaff's mother moved to Detroit soon after Pfaff's birth, leaving Pfaff and brother to be raised by their grandparents. Post-war London was bleak; Pfaff has described playing in bombed out and abandoned buildings, gathering "raw materials for fantasy buildings." A reunion in 1956 with her mother in Detroit, where she attended Cass Technical High School, did not end well. At age 15, Pfaff left home and eventually married a U.S. Air Force officer. She attended Wayne State University and Southern Illinois University, completing a BFA at Washington University in 1971.

When Pfaff enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University School of Art, she was significantly more mature in age and experience than many of her classmates. She embraced the use of heavy equipment and outsized materials and was influenced by other disciplines such as physics, medicine, zoology, and astronomy. She also participated in Process Art and the Pattern and Decoration movement which continued on in the future of her artwork.

Pfaff creates paintings, sculpture, prints and installation art. Of the creation of her work, she says "I’ve always done prints and drawings, always. No one buys those installations, so when you see things that are portable that I’m not attached to, they’re probably two-dimensional. If you get an installation of mine, you inherit [my assistant] Ryan, myself, a crew, the dog, the noise, the dirt. We wreck the house. So if you don’t want that, then you get prints and drawings."

Her installation art has been compared to that of "a collagist in space.". New York Times art critic, Roberta Smith, wrote of Pfaff's work "she has been creating elaborately impure, implicitly narrative environments for more than 25 years. She is at the top of her form in the airy, exhilarating Neither Here Nor There." Benjamin Genocchio, also with the New York Times, described several of Pfaff's works undergoing renovation:

Although these works look random, when you begin to get into them it is remarkable how all the elements seem to hang together and develop on one another. She seems somehow to get order and disorder working for her at the same time. It is a very contemporary quality, given our lives today.

Pfaff has also done scenic design. In 2010 Ameringer/McEnery/Yoke showed a retrospective from her oeuvre ranging from the late 1970s to recent work. In a review in The Brooklyn Rail, Kara L. Rooney wrote of the survey's cohesion, "somehow, Pfaff’s eclectic interpretation of ’80s flamboyance, ’90s insecurity, and the aughts’ incessant optimism succeeds."

Pfaff taught at the California Institute of the Arts from 1976 to 1979. She joined the faculty at Bard College in New York in 1994, where she is currently the codirector of the Studio Arts program.

Exhibitions

2015: "Marks Made: Prints by American Women Artists from the 1960s to the Present", Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, Florida.

2014: "Run Amok," site-specific installation, Loretta Howard Gallery, New York, NY.

1995: "Elephant," site-specific installation, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA