Ida Applebroog

Ida Applebroog (born November 11, 1929) is an American painter currently living and working in New York. Since the 1970s Applebroog has been known for creating paintings, sculptures, artists' books and several films that often explore the themes of gender, sexual identity, violence and politics. Her works can be found in numerous public collections in the United States including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Applebroog has been the recipient of multiple honors including the MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant", the College Art Association Distinguished Art Award for Lifetime Achievement, an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, New School for Social Research/Parsons School of Design.

Ida Applebroog was born in the Bronx, New York on November 11, 1929 into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Family. She attended NY State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences from 1948 to 1950. At the Institute, she studied graphic design instead of fine art. Applebroog stated that she, “couldn’t make art without also making money.” While studying at NY State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences, she began to work at an advertising agency where she was the only woman. Applebroog later recounted, “In those days sexual harassment was a day-to-day event. I held out in the ad agency for six months, then resigned.”

After resigning from the advertising agency, she went on to work as a freelance illustrator for children’s books and greeting cards. In 1950, she married Gideon Horowitz, her high school sweetheart. She took a job in the art division of the New York Public Library. She also began to take night classes at City College of New York during this time. By 1960, Applebroog had four children and in order for her husband to complete his doctorate, Applebroog and her family had to move to Chicago. After moving to Chicago Applebroog took courses at the School of the Art Institute and made jewelry in her family's basement that her husband and children would sell at art fairs.

In 1968 Applebroog and her family relocated again to Southern California where her husband accepted an academic position. While living in San Diego, California, Applebroog began sketching close-ups of her own naked body, specifically her crotch, while in the bathtub, a series of more than 150 works she would not exhibit until 2010. During the time she was making her bathtub sketches, Applebroog was briefly hospitalized for depression. She was released by 1970 and promptly began to continue making art in her studio in San Diego. Once she returned from her hospitalization, she began to create sculptures of “biomorphic forms made from fabric” amongst much other art. At the age of forty-four she participated in one of her earliest group exhibitions, entitled "Invisible/Visible" in 1972 at Long Beach Art Museum.

The following year Applebroog went to the Feminist Artists Conference at California Institute of the Arts, where she spoke with many women artists and was highly influenced by their enthusiasm toward social activism in art. Applebroog moved back to New York City in 1974. It was there, after changing her name from "Ida Horowitz" to "Ida Applebroog" (based on her maiden name, Applebaum), where she began to develop her own signature artistic style with a series of cartoonlike figures that merged the comic-strip format with the advertising industry’s use of story-boards to explain a concept. Starting in 1977 she circulated a series of self-published books through the mail, and joined Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. In 1981 she showed "Applebroog: Silent Stagings", her first exhibition at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NY, where she continued to show for over 20 years.

During the decade of the 1990s, she received multiple honors including the College Art Association Distinguished Art Award for Lifetime Achievement, an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, New School for Social Research/Parsons School of Design. She also received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1998 and her art was the subject of a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Applebroog's work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Corcoran Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and others. She was profiled in the PBS documentary "Art 21: Art in the Twenty-first Century". In 2010, Applebroog's works on paper, including her 1969 sketches, were exhibited in a solo show entitled Ida Applebroog: Monalisa at Hauser & Wirth in New York, and in 2011 at Hauser & Wirth in London.

Applebroog currently lives in New York and is represented by Hauser & Wirth.

Books

• Galileo Works, 1977, Self Published
• Dyspepsia Works, 1979, Self Published
• Blue Books, 1981, Self Published

Videos

• Lunch Hour Tapes, 1977 25 minutes
• It's No Use Alberto, 1978 23 minutes
• Belladonna, 1989, 12 minutes (with Beth B)
• Studio Visit, 2005. Public Eye Productions, Music by Jim Coleman
• Art 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century (season 3, 2005. PBS

Images from exhibitions

• dOCUMENTA (13) Images from the exhibition

• Applebroog, Ida; Lignel, Benjamin; Prose, Francine (2002). Ida Applebroog, 1976-2002: are you bleeding yet?. La maison Red. pp. 366–367. ISBN 9781564660879. 

• Artist’s Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1980
• Creative Artists in Public Service Program, New York Council on the Arts, 1983
• Artist’s Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1985
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1990
• Milton Avery Distinguished Chair, Bard College, 1991–92
• Lifetime Achievement Award, College Art Association, 1995
• Honorary Doctorate, New School University/Parson School of Design, 1997
• MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1998
• Women's Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award, 2008
• Anonymous Was A Woman Award, 2009