Blythe Bohnen (born 1940) is an American artist known for her minimalistic

graphite Graphite () is a crystalline form of the element carbon. It consists of stacked layers of graphene. Graphite occurs naturally and is the most stable form of carbon under standard conditions. Synthetic and natural graphite are consumed on lar ...

drawings and photographs that represent aspects of motion. She uses shutter speed.

Early life and education

Bohnen earned a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four year ...

art history Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today ...

at Smith College, Bachelor of Fine Arts at

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with ...

, and Master of Fine Arts at Hunter College."Blythe Bohnen," ''MATRIX 13'' (New Haven, CT: Wadsworth Antheneum, 1975).

Art career

She was one of the founding members of A.I.R. Gallery, established in New York City in 1972, the first not-for-profit, cooperative exhibition space for women in the United States. Bohnen's work is generally conceptual in nature, often in the form of

self-portraits A self-portrait is a representation of an artist that is drawn, painted, photographed, or sculpted by that artist. Although self-portraits have been made since the earliest times, it is not until the Early Renaissance in the mid-15th century tha ...

that capture the motions of her body. She originally created works using predominantly graphite, but added photography to her repertoire in 1974 to continue her exploration of movement and the human form, titling each work after the motions she was making to create each work. Her drawings feature a grid format that she used to arrange the severely limited and carefully executed motions of her hand that she captured in the graphite, resulting in monochromatic drawings that assert their reality as markings on paper instead of an illusion of something else, as seen in ''Motion Touching Five Points with Graphite Stick'' (1973), ''One Motion with Graphite Stick, Horizontal and Vertical'' (1974), and ''Motion Touching Five Points'' (1975; Art Institute of Chicago). In contrast to her drawings, which focus on the motions of the arm and hand, Bohnen's photographs primarily address the motions of the head. With her photography, Bohnen used various shutter speeds to overlap blurred images to provoke strong emotional and intellectual reactions about motion and identity,Koeppel, Fredric. "Brooks Exhibit a Sum of Many Parts—Asst. Curator Creates Spaces with Old, New." ''The Commercial Appeal'' (March 21, 2004). as in ''Self-Portrait: Vertical Elliptical Motion, Large'' (1974; Asheville Art Museum) and ''Vertical Motion Up Medium: Pivotal Motion Medium'' (1983; Brooklyn Museum).

Collections

Her work is included in collections of the Asheville Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum,Blythe Bohnen, Brooklyn Museum.
Retrieved 10/04/2014 the Art Institute of Chicago,Blythe Bohnen, Art Institute of Chicago.
Retrieved 10/4/2014. the

International Center of Photography The International Center of Photography (ICP), at 79 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, consists of a museum for photography and visual culture and a school offering an array of educational courses and programming. ...

,Handy, Ellen, et al. ''Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection'' (New York: International Center of Photography, 1999), 209. and the

Museum of Fine Arts Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Build ...

Publications

Blythe Bohnen. Being There and Not Being There, ed. David Hall Gallery, Wellesley, Massachusetts 2023, ISBN 978-1-7355143-0-7, 168 pages, with essays by Silke von Berswordt-Wallrabe, Suzanne Hudson, Anna Lovatt, Karen Irvine, David Mather.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bohnen, Blythe 1940 births American conceptual artists American women conceptual artists Artists from Evanston, Illinois Living people Boston University alumni Smith College alumni Hunter College alumni 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American women artists