Roberta Allen

Roberta Allen is a short story writer, novelist, memoirist, conceptual artist, sculptor, photographer, and creative writing instructor. Language has been the inspiration for both her writing and her art. In her conceptual works - which include drawings, collages, artist books, photo/text works, installations and digital prints - she explores how text informs or changes our perception of images, often with more than a hint of humor and a philosophical bent. With dark humor, her books present characters at odds with themselves and others, sometimes in exotic locales.

Roberta Allen is a New York-based artist who was born and raised in New York, NY. At age twenty, she traveled alone to Europe and lived briefly in Athens, Amsterdam and Berlin, later in Mexico. Over the years, she traveled, often alone, to the Peruvian Amazon, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, Mali and countries in Central America.

Allen began as a painter living in Amsterdam where she had her first one-person gallery exhibition in 1967. After several one-person shows in New York, she joined John Weber Gallery in 1973 and had one-person exhibitions there in 1974, 75, 77, 79. During this time, she also had one-person gallery exhibitions in Milan, Dusseldorf, Brussels, Munich and Rome. She had one-person museum exhibitions at MoMA P.S. 1, L.I.C., NY, 1977, 80; the Kunstforum, Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1981, and The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Western Australia, 1989. Her conceptual works, which combine image and text, include drawings, collages, artist books, photo/text series and installations. She has been in over one hundred group exhibitions worldwide. After 1981, while continuing to make conceptual art and exhibiting intermittently, she preferred to stay outside the art world. In 2014, the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla, CA began a catalogue raisonne of her multiple edition 1970s artist books and a one-person exhibition of her 1970s art took place at Minus Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. A one-person show of recent conceptual drawings and one-of-a-kind artist books took place at the Athenaeum in 2016.

• 2016 Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, CA.
• 2014 Minus Space, Brooklyn, NY
• 1989 Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Western Australia
• 1981 Galerie Walter Storms, Munich, Germany
• Kunstforum, Stadt. Galerie im Lembachhaus, Munich, Germany
• Galleria Primo Piano, Rome, Italy
• 1980 P.S. 1 Museum, Long Island City, NY
• 1979 John Weber Gallery, NYC
• 1978 Hal Bromm Gallery, NYC
• MTL Galerie, Brussels, Belgium
• Fine Arts Center, C.W. Post College, Glenvale, LI., NY
• 1977 Galerie Maier-Hahn, Dusseldorf, Germany
• John Weber Gallery, NYC
• Franklin Furnace, NYC
• P.S. 1 Museum, Long Island City, NY
• 1975 John Weber Gallery, NYC
• 1974 John Weber Gallery, NYC
• Galleria Toselli, Milan, Italy
• 1967 Galerie 845, Amsterdam, Netherlands

• 1989 Artist-In-Residence Fellowship, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia
• 1985 VCCA Residency Feliowship
• 1985 LINE (NEA & NYS Council) Grant
• 1983 Yaddo Residency Fellowship
• 1978-79 CAPS (Creative Artists Public Service) Grant (Sculpture)
• 1972 Ossabaw Island Project Residency Fellowship
• 1971-72 MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship

• Some Facts About Fear, published by the artist, Rome, 1981, limited edition
• Everything in the world there is to know is known by somebody, but not by the same knower, Ottenhausen Verlag, Munich, 1981, edition of 300
• Possibilities, John Weber Gallery & Parasol Press, 1977, edition of 1000
• Pointless Acts, Collation Center, NY 1977, edition of 1000
• Pointless Arrows, published by the artist, 197G, edition of 1000
• Partially Trapped Lines, Parasol Press, SA, 1975, limited edition of 200
• The Invisible Line of Limitation, Parasol Press, SA, 1975, limited edition of 200

• Torri, Erika, Roberta Allen, Artists' Books Collection, Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, CA., May 2017, 64 pages.
• Seed, John, Clusters of Loose Geometries in Conceptual "Thought Drawings," Roberta Allen (Review), Hyperallergic, Nov. 10, 2016 online.
• Catalog of exhibition, Un Museo Ideale: The Collection of Bianca & Mario Bertolini, Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy, 2015.
• Vartanian, Hrag, Best of 2014: Our Top 10 Brooklyn Art Shows: #2 Roberta Allen: Works from the 1970s at Minus Space, Hyperallergic, Dec. 23, 2014, online.
• Wynn Kramarshy / Amy Eshoo, Editor, 560 BROADWAy: A New York Drawing Collection at Work, 1991-2006, Fifth Floor Foundation with Yale University Press, 2008, pp 161, 177.
• Erweiteerte Fotografie/Extended Photography, catalog of exhibition at Wiener Seccession, Vienna, Austria, 1981
• Rein, Ingrid, Paradoxa mit Pfeil und Fisch, Die Installationen von Roberta Allen, Suddeutsche Zeitung, April 27, 1981
• Skira Annuel, Art Actuel, 1979, Geneva, Statement by the artist, p 32
• O'Grady, Holly, The Paradoxical Arrow: Roberta Allen's Installations And Books, (article), Arts Magazine, February 1979, pp 156,157
• Lopes Cardozo, Judith, Roberta Allen (review) Artforum, February 1978, pp 73, 74
• Lubell, Ellen, Roberta Allen (review) Arts Magazine, October 1977, pp 23,24
• Deitch, Jeffrey, Roberta Allen, (article), Arts Magazine, June 1977, p 6
• Auping, Michael, New Work/New York catalog of exhibition at California State University, Los Angeles, 1976.
• Lubell, Ellen, Alighiero E. Boetti/Roberta Allen (review), Arts Magazine, April 1975, pp 19, 20
• Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, Roberta Allen (review), Artforum, May 1974, p 69

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
• The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NYC
• Bibliotheque du France, Paris, France
• Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio
• Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA
• Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany
• Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia
• Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT.
• Athenaeum, Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, CA
• Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy

Allen began writing fiction in 1979 while making conceptual art. Her first stories were published in 1980 by Sun & Moon Press in the anthology Contemporary American Fiction (along with John Ashbery and Walter Abish, among others). Her first story collection was The Traveling Woman, (Vehicle Editions). Her other books are The Daughter, (Autonomedia), Certain People, (Coffee House Press); Amazon Dream (City Lights) Fast Fiction, (Story Press), The Playful Way to Serious Writing, The Playful to Knowing Yourself, (both Houghton Mifflin) and The Dreaming Girl (Painted Leaf, new edition Ellipsis Press). Her latest story collection, The Princess of Herself, will be published by Pelekinesis in September. Her short shorts and short stories have appeared in over 300 literary magazines, including Conjunctions, Guernica, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Open City, The Collagist, Gargoyle and in many anthologies, including Micro Fiction, to be published by W.W. Norton in 2017. She received the 2015 Honorable Mention for The Gertrude Stein Award for Fiction. She has been a Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction at the University of the South and a Yaddo Fellow.

Teaching positions include: The Writing Program, New School University from 1992 – 2010, Columbia University's School of the Arts, University of the South, Sewanee, TN, Parsons School of Design, NY, Summer Writers' Conference, Hofstra University, International Women's Writing Guild Conference, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Allen's private writing workshops began in 1991 and continue to the present.