Beverly Fishman

Beverly Fishman (born 1955, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American 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 was 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. While Fishman's artworks often look abstract, they are based on appropriated shapes, patterns, and images drawn from the pharmaceutical and illicit drug industries as well as multiple forms of scientific and medical imaging. As she noted in 2017, "Although they look abstract, my paintings are tied to problems like attention-deficit disorder, opioid addiction, anxiety, and depression. Their forms connect them to the social problems of today."

Beverly Fishman
Beverly Fishman at the Contemporary Dayton, Ohio, 2023.
Born	1955 (age 68–69) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Education	Philadelphia College of Art (BFA), Yale University (MFA)
Known for	painting
Awards	Anonymous Was a Woman Guggenheim Fellowship (2005)

Early life and education

Beverly Fishman was born in Pennsylvania where she pursued painting from an early age. She received her BFA in 1977 from the Philadelphia College of Art, where she studied with Ree Morton, and her MFA in 1980 from Yale University, where she worked with Elizabeth Murray, Mel Bochner, and Judy Pfaff.

Work of the 1980s

While at Yale, Fishman began to explore sculpture, an investigation that occupied her intensely for the first half of the 1980s. Made of burlap, plaster, plastic, chicken wire, rope, and various types of paint, Fishman's sculptures resembled violently disassembled bodies, referencing the history of post-minimalism as well as contemporaneous feminist critiques of the patriarchal view of women as primarily corporeal and abject. As Fishman later recalled, "Looking at anatomy books and everything under the skin, I was interested in the body as viscera. I created large, abject sculptures that showed human beings as internal, biological, and centered in the flesh. I was interested not in what we looked like externally but in what we were as material, chemical, and electrical organisms. As a feminist, I was also highly aware of how society tried to reduce women to physical and emotional characteristics. In part, my sculptures were a way to highlight and subvert those readings of women as (mere) bodies." Working generatively (using earlier artworks as the starting point for new ones), Fishman began to make large-scale drawings based on the sculptures, reimagining her organic forms and socially-critical concepts in a new medium. In particular, these expressionistically-rendered, brightly-colored pastel "bodyscapes," which Fishman pursued between 1985 and 1987, were constructed so as to undermine distinctions between inside and outside worlds.

During the late 1980s, Fishman switched processes again and began to create mixed-media paintings on wood that incorporated collage elements made with photocopier machines. "Appropriating and abstracting images of [human] cells, I sought to link the reproduction of images to mutation and biological development. Living in New York during the AIDS crisis, I was aware of how a virus could define one’s identity. I wanted to represent the body while engaging with the technologies through which our interiors were visualized and reproduced." As a result of this focus technologically-mediated vision and the parallels between organic and technological forms of reproduction, the shapes of Fishman's mixed-media paintings began to morph, referencing the history of the shaped canvas, while mimicking the forms of microscopes, telescopes, and petri dishes.

Work of the 1990s

In the early 1990s, Fishman began to mix appropriated images of stars and nebulae with her cellular imagery to suggest more analogies between the body and space, micro- and macrocosm. These tondo-shaped canvases culminated in large-scale installations like Intervention at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1995, which incorporated the DIA’s great entrance hall—lined with vitrines containing medieval armor—to evoke questions about how human beings continuously change their identities through science and technology. In the mid-1990s, Fishman began creating installations of cell-like modules consisting of photo-collage, acrylic, and resin. Referencing post-minimalism, feminism, and commodity art, she explored shaped module as a mixture of appropriated and hand-painted elements, while simultaneously using grid-like installations to present the body as commodity as well as to destabilize oppositions between biological and technological modes of reproduction. New forms of cluster paintings emerged in the late 1990s, in which up to 100 elements were combined into single, multi-component works. Suggesting organic development, mutability, and transformation, these cluster paintings engaged with the history of the shaped canvas as well as multiple traditions of representation and abstraction in contemporary art.

Work of the 2000s

In the early 2000s, Fishman diversified her artistic practice still further. “Around 2000 I turned from an image bank evoking disease to one that visualized pharmaceutical cures. Using cast resin with pigment, I created new forms of cluster paintings: sculptural works that hung on the wall and that further undermined distinctions between painting, sculpture, installation, and environment. The early resin clusters appropriated the shapes of pills in order to raise questions about our stereotypes of sickness and health, normal and abnormal. The clusters in turn evolved into glow-in-the- dark pharmaceutical installations that explored color and form as they changed under different environmental conditions. Appropriated images of ecstasy pills, which revealed the designing and branding of illegal drugs, became part of the mix in 2007.” Also in the early 2000s, Fishman began to create modular metal paintings that combined different scientific and medical representations of the body—sound waves, molecules, DNA helixes, and EKG and EEG patterns—with the logos of different pharmaceutical brands, like Valium and Haldol. Initially, these paintings were made by collaging industrial sign-vinyl onto powder-coated aluminum rectangles, but in 2008, Fishman began screen-printing multiple layers of enamel on polished stainless steel, creating a quasi-reflective surface that incorporated both viewers and the environment. Introducing additional trace representational elements culled from circuit diagrams, Bar and QR codes, and DNA notation, Fishman’s paintings enveloped and refracted their audiences, representing them as if on multiple screens. Suggesting that we are constantly being quantified by different forms of scientific and commercial imaging, they radiated ambivalence about technology and in particular the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

Exhibitions

In 1986 her art was in the show Sydney Blum/Petah Coyne/Beverly Fishman at P.S. 122, New York. In 2002 she had a solo show at Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard, the gallery which was formerly known as Gallery Oz and subsequently known as Galerie Richard. Her solo show Focus: Beverly Fishman was featured at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. The exhibition Beverly Fishman: Dose, curated by Nick Cave was exhibited in 2017. In 2018 she exhibited Chemical Sublime at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago. In 2019, she exhibited Future Perfect at Kavi Gupta.

In 2020, she exhibited “I Dream of Sleep” at the Miles McEnery Gallery.

Related publications

Fishman's art has been the subject of major reviews by art critics Donald Kuspit and Jason Stopa in Art in America. Dorothy Mayhall published the exhibition catalog for the show Beverly Fishman: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, shown November 4 – December 6, 1985 at the Housatonic Museum of Art.

Fishman was interviewed by Leslie Wayne of the online magazine Art Critical about three solo shows: Pain Management at the Library Street Collective in Detroit, Michigan; Another Day in Paradise at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts in Birmingham, Alabama, and Dose, curated by Nick Cave at the CUE Foundation in NYC.

In 2017 Zachary Small reviewed Beverly Fishman: Color Coding Big Pharma for art21 magazine, and she was interviewed by Jason Stopa for Art in America magazine about her abstract art derived from a focus on pill and medication addictions. Stopa wrote that Fishman "creates powerful abstract paintings that address technology and the pharmaceutical industry" and adds, "Fishman is a painter with the concerns of a sculptor, making paintings that require high levels of production. Her studio practice includes manufacturing uniquely shaped supports and consulting with automotive paint specialists to get the background she needs to achieve industrial finishes."

Awards and honors

Fishman was awarded an Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2018. Fishman received her BFA from Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) in 1977. Fishman received her MFA degree from Yale University in 1980. At Yale she studied under Judy Pfaff and Elizabeth Murray. Her work is included in the Hallmark Collection. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.

External links

• Artist's personal website
• Gallery website