Ida Applebroog (born November 11, 1929) is an American multi-media

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...

who is best-known for her paintings and sculptures that explore the themes of gender, sexual identity, violence and politics. Applebroog has been the recipient of multiple honors including the

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

"Genius Grant", the

College Art Association The College Art Association of America (CAA) is the principal organization in the United States for professionals in the visual arts, from students to art historians to emeritus faculty. Founded in 1911, it "promotes these arts and their unders ...

Distinguished Art Award for Lifetime Achievement, an

Honorary Doctorate An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hono ...

Fine Arts In European academic traditions, fine art is developed primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from decorative art or applied art, which also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwor ...

New School for Social Research The New School for Social Research (NSSR) is a graduate-level educational institution that is one of the divisions of The New School in New York City, United States. The university was founded in 1919 as a home for progressive era thinkers. NSS ...

Parsons School of Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...

. Applebroog currently resides in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

and is represented by Hauser & Wirth.

Life and work

Ida Applebroog was born as Ida Appelbaum on November 11, 1929 in the

Bronx The Bronx () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the state of New York. It is south of Westchester County; north and east of the New York City borough of Manhattan, across the Harlem River; and north of the New Y ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish Family. From 1948 to 1950, she attended NY State Institute of Applied Arts and Sciences. 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, Applebroog 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 The New York Public Library (NYPL) is a public library system in New York City. With nearly 53 million items and 92 locations, the New York Public Library is the second largest public library in the United States (behind the Library of Congress) ...

. 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 of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew into the museum and ...

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. In 1969 Applebroog was briefly hospitalized for depression, during which time she began making bathtub sketches.Steinhauer, Jill
"The Drawings Ida Applebroog Made During a Breakdown"
Hyperallergic, Retrieved 13 January 2019. 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 Museum of Art The Long Beach Museum of Art is a museum located on Ocean Boulevard in the Bluff Park neighborhood of Long Beach, California, United States. The museum's permanent collection includes over 4,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, works on paper, an ...

. 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. Applebroog has stated that the subject of her work is "how power works--male over female, parents over children, governments over people, doctors over patients." In 2005 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. In 2016 Applebroog was the subject of the documentary ''Call Her Applebroog,'' directed by her daughter

Beth B Scott B and Beth B (also known as Scott and Beth B, Beth and Scott B or The Bs after B Movies) were among the best-known New York No Wave underground film makers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. They went on to form an independent film p ...

Selected works

Books

*''Galileo Works'', 1977, Self Published *''Dyspepsia Works'', 1979, Self Published *''Blue Books'', 1981, Self Published

Images from exhibitions

*''dOCUMENTA (13
Images from the exhibition

Select public collections

* The Corcoran Museum of Art *

The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of t ...

* Guggenheim Museum *

Whitney Museum of Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942 ...

Awards and grants

* Artist's Fellowship,

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

, 1980"Ida Applebroog"
Hauser & Wirth, Retrieved 13 January 2019. * Creative Artists in Public Service Program,

New York State Council on the Arts The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) is an arts council serving the U.S. state of New York. It was established in 1960 through a bill introduced in the New York State Legislature by New York State Senator MacNeil Mitchell MacNeil Mitc ...

, 1983 * Artist's Fellowship,

, 1985 *

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the art ...

, 1990 * Milton Avery Distinguished Chair,

Bard College Bard College is a private liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The campus overlooks the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, and is within the Hudson River Historic District—a National Historic Landmark. Founded in 1860, ...

, 1991–92 * Lifetime Achievement Award,

, 1995 *

, New School University/

, 1997 * MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 1998 *

Women's Caucus for Art The Women's Caucus for Art (WCA), founded in 1972, is a non-profit organization based in New York City, which supports women artists, art historians, students, educators, and museum professionals. The WCA holds exhibitions and conferences to promo ...

Lifetime Achievement Award, 2008 * Anonymous Was A Woman Award, 2009"Recipients to Date - Ida Applebroog"
Anonymous was a woman, Retrieved 13 January 2019.

References

External links

Official website

Ida Applebroog
at Hauser & Wirth
Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips
from PBS series '' Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century'' - Season 3 (2005).
Ida Applebrog at the Brooklyn Museum

1978 23 minutes

1989, 12 minutes (with Beth B)

2005

Music b
Jim Coleman
{{DEFAULTSORT:Applebroog, Ida 1929 births Living people American contemporary painters American women painters Feminist artists Jewish painters MacArthur Fellows School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni People from the Bronx Painters from New York City 20th-century American painters 20th-century American women artists Franklin Furnace artists Jewish American artists 21st-century American women artists Heresies Collective members 21st-century American Jews Neo-expressionist artists