Artist: Judith
K. Brodsky Title: My
Grandchildren Came to the Cemetery
Description: Photo etching Medium: Photography Size:
25” x 20”
Judith K. Brodsky is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is the Founding Director of the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, renamed the Brodsky Center in her honor in September 2006. Brodsky is the co-founder and co-director with Dr. Ferris Olin, of the Rutgers Institute for Women and Art, a member institute of the Institute for Women’s Leadership at Rutgers. She and Olin are the facilitators of The Feminist Art Project, a national program to promote understanding of the role of women artists in the cultural milieu and are Co-Principal Investigators and Co-Directors of WAAND (Women Artists Archives National Directory.
Brodsky is the president of the Philadelphia Print Collaborative and chair of its international contemporary art festival, Philagrafika 2010. She is a past national president of ArtTable, the College Art Association, and the Women’s Caucus for Art. She is a former dean and former associate provost at Rutgers University as well as former chair of the art department at the Rutgers campus at Newark.
Brodsky has organized and curated many exhibitions and written extensively about women and prints. She was a contributor to the first comprehensive history of the American women’s movement in art, called The Power of Feminist Art, published in 1994 by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. An exhibition she organized and curated called 100 New Jersey Artists Make Prints traveled throughout the United States as well as to Middle East, and Africa venues. Brodsky is organizing the 25th anniversary exhibition of the Brodsky Center, which is scheduled to open at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2012. The planning of this exhibition has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and will include a catalogue and website. Brodsky with Olin curated the exhibitions, How American Women Artists Invented Postmodernism, and ecCENTRIC Bodies, both under the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series, of which they are co-curators. Very active in policy-making positions in the art world, Brodsky presently serves on the boards of ArtPride/New Jersey, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the International Print Center New York.
A printmaker and artist in her own right, Brodsky’s work is in the permanent collections of over 100 museums and corporations such as The Library of Congress; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Stadtsmuseum, Berlin; the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, University of California at Los Angeles; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum; the New Jersey State Museum; and the Fogg Museum at Harvard. She has a Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University and a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University where she majored in art history.
In her own prints and drawings, Brodsky works with an early 21st century iconography, reflecting the intellectual, political, and social issues of our time as filtered through her own individuality. Her images of the environment, women, and family become metaphors for her feelings about life, decay, death, and possible salvation. Brodsky works in series. One of the most complex in recent years is a suite of 15 lithographs called The Meadowlands Strike Back. The suite is a narrative sequence with an apocalyptic theme using images from the northern New Jersey industrial wastelands of oil refineries, air and sea ports, and highways. Another recent series is entitled, One Hundred Million Women Are Missing. Reflecting her interest in archives and memory, Brodsky created an installation titled Memoir of an Assimilated Family, consisting of approximately 100 etchings based on old family photographs, each image accompanied by anecdotal text. The piece submitted to Pinot to Picasso is one of these etchings.