Bonnie Collura (born 1970) is an American artist known for figurative multi-media sculptures, textiles and installations created by processes of compositing and sampling.Smith, Roberta. "Bonnie Collura," The New York Times, January 30, 1998, p. E36. Retrieved March 2, 2023.Landi, Ann. "Mutable Bodies: A Conversation with Bonnie Collura," Sculpture Magazine, September/October 2021, p. 18–30. Retrieved March 2, 2023.Skulpturen Park Köln. Bonnie Collura, Exhibition. Retrieved March 2, 2023. Her art oscillates between abstraction and figuration, mixing aesthetics from baroque sculpture, contemporary animation and quilting with iconic fragments from pop culture, art history and myth.Heartney Eleanor. "Bonnie Collura at Susan Inglett," Art in America, March 2004.Levin, Kim. "Masters of the Universe," The Village Voice, May 16, 2000 .Retrieved March 3, 2023.Johnson, Ken. "Bonnie Collura – 'Rebel Angel,'" The New York Times, October 26, 2003, p. E34. Retrieved March 2, 2023. She has embraced theatricality and excess, intertextuality and digital-age influences in her work, often exploring hybridized, disjointed bodies, surrogate characters and reconfigured literary tropes.Avgikos, Jan. "The Shape of Art at the End of the Century," Sculpture, April 1998.Ritchie, Matthew. "The Untold Story," Performing Arts Journal, January 1997, p. 87–90. Retrieved March 3, 2023.Maxwell, Douglas. "Bonnie Collura," Review, April 15, 1999, p. 26. Sculpture critic Ann Landi has written, "Collura incorporates wildly diverse materials and processes while also drawing on a wide array of references—everything from cartoons and movies like Star Wars to highbrow texts such as The Prince and Frankenstein ... Diffuse and open-ended, appealing to storytelling and world-making, her work continues to evolve, carrying on a feminist tradition in its materials and mythologies."
Collura has exhibited at institutions including the Walker Art Center,Abbe, Mary. "Raiders," StarTribune, July 14, 2000, p. 10–2.Abbe, Mary. "Walker offers dark dreams and new curiosities," StarTribune, July 10, 2013. Retrieved March 2, 2023. Smack Mellon,Schwendener Martha. "What to See in New York Art Galleries this Week: Bonnie Collura and Rachelle Mozman Solano," The New York Times, February 15, 2019, p. C23. Retrieved March 2, 2023. Hallwalls,Massier, John. Bonnie Collura: Mutable Bodies, Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls, 2022. Retrieved March 3, 2023. and Dallas Museum of Art.Kutner, Janet. "Artists Cast the Familiar in Eccentric Light," The Dallas Morning News, November 4, 1998, p. 1-3C. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim FellowshipJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Bonnie Collura," Fellows. Retrieved March 2, 2023. and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary ArtsFoundation for Contemporary Arts. "Bonnie Collura," Grants. Retrieved March 2, 2023. and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.Zimmer, William. "From Now and From Then, Art That's Both New and Novel," The New York Times, October 30, 2002, p. CN14. Retrieved March 2, 2023. Her work belongs to the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art,Dallas Museum of Art. Snowman, Bonnie Collura, Collection. Retrieved March 2, 2023. Skulpturen Park Köln (Cologne Sculpture Park), and Walker Art Center,Walker Art Center. Snowman, Bonnie Collura, Collections. Retrieved March 2, 2023. among others.
Education and career Collura was born in 1970 in Port Jefferson, New York.Parrish Art Museum. About the Bayberry Bush, Southampton, NY: Parrish Art Museum, 2001. She received a BFA (1994) from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where she studied with sculptors Elizabeth King and Myron Helfgott. Her early work at VCU and Yale University (MFA, 1996) was figurative and critically examined Disney cartoon and fairy-tale characters as constructed images.Penn State College of Art and Architecture. Bonnie Collura, Faculty, Retrieved March 2, 2023.
Soon after graduating, Collura began to exhibit, gaining recognition through group shows at Apex Art,Kraynak, Janet. "Pagan Stories: The Situations of Narrative in Recent Art," Apexart, 1997. Retrieved March 2, 2023. the Aldrich Museum,Jones, Ronald. "Best of 1998: Ronald Jones," Artforum, December 1998. Retrieved March 3, 2023.Zimmer, William. "Recipe for a Good Time: Surrealism and Pop Culture," The New York Times, August 2, 1998, p. CN14. Retrieved March 2, 2023. and Thread Waxing Space,Smith, Roberta. "Spectacular Optical," The New York Times, July 3, 1998, p. E33. Retrieved March 2, 2023. and solo shows at Janice Guy (1997), Basilico Fine Arts (1998, 1999) and Lehmann Maupin (2000) in New York,Saltz, Jerry. "Bonnie Collura at Janice Guy," Time Out New York, 1997.Hunt, David. "Bonnie Collura, Basilico Fine Arts," Flash Art Summer 1998, p. 138. the Dallas Museum of Art (1998)Tyson, Janet. "Body of Work," Fort Worth Star-Telegram November 7, 1998, p. 1F, 3F. and Walker Art Center (2000). She had later solo exhibitions at Susan Inglett Gallery (2003, 2004),Jana, Reena. "Bonnie Collura, Susan Inglett," ARTnews, December 2003, p. 121. Claire Oliver Fine Arts (2006),Amy, Michaël. "Bonnie Collura," Sculpture, January–February 2007, p. 72–73. Smack Mellon (2019), and Hallwalls (2022),Licata, Elizabeth. "Bonnie Collura at Hallwalls: Highly crafted weird science from a celebrated sculptor," Buffalo Spree, March 16, 2022. Retrieved March 3, 2023. among others.
Work and critical reception Collura emerged in the later 1990s among artists responding to such issues as the disavowal of referentiality and narrative by modernism, postmodern information overload, and the collapse of various universal distinctions (e.g., organism and machine, human and animal).Avgikos, Jan. "Bonnie Collura," Artforum, October 1997, p. 101–02. Retrieved March 2, 2023. Her work has often been described as "hybrid," fitting disparate physical and conceptual elements, processes, references and signifiers into uneasy wholes.Koplos, Janet. "Bonnie Collura at Basilico," Art in America, September 1998, p. 124–25. She employs recognizable elements of classic pre-modernist statuary (such as expressive poses and gesture), while challenging that tradition through unconventional construction techniques and fusions of abstract and organic form. Her method has been described as a "shuffled deck" of images and meanings crossing centuries, aesthetic inspirations (the religious, erotic baroque of Bernini, Disney animation, the grotesque) and cultural sources (mythical, Biblical and religious stories, classic Hollywood movies).Strelow, Heike. "Filled with Life: Body and Mind," Biomorph! Hans Arp, 2011, p. 34, 78–79.
Critics ascribe to her work a sense of mutability (despite its generally fixed form) and duality rendering it vaguely familiar, yet iconoclastic and alien. Curator John Massier described it as "figurative-fluid"—in a temporalized state of flux and becoming, with appearance and meaning shifts based on a viewer's perspective. She takes a similar approach to literature, in postmodern deconstructive fashion dissecting and reassembling tropes—often involving love, loyalty, gender and the body with lethal consequences—through a contemporary feminist lens. Throughout her career, Collura has supplemented her work with an elaborate, if hermetic, cosmology sometimes conveyed in drawings, charts or texts.Cotter, Holland. "Bonnie Collura," The New York Times, May 12, 2000, p. E36. Retrieved March 2, 2023.Schwabsky, Barry. "Matthew Ritchie," Artforum, January 2001. . Retrieved March 2, 2023.
Exhibitions 1997–2007 In her first solo exhibition, "To the Third" (Janice Guy, 1997), Collura fused the Greek underworld myth of Persephone and the story of Snow White into an ambitious sculptural installation exploring the neo-pagan Triple Goddess (Maiden/Mother/Crone) theme. The tableau of interlocking, almost melted-looking figural and landscape elements—semi-organic shrouded fragments, gesturing limbs and forms resembling theatrical props, prototypes or debris from children's games—was hand-carved from foam insulation and smoothly painted in a cartoon-like color scheme.Cameron, Dan. "1997 in Review: The Endless Biennial," Artforum, December–January 1997. Retrieved March 3, 2023. Artforum'''s Jan Avgikos wrote that it "tapped into a cutting edge where comics, cartoons, and movies meet computer-generated models, animation, and special effects ... a virtual reality of mutability: everything is familiar, thoroughly generic, and constantly morphing. Characters bleed into one another, crossing temporal and spatial boundaries."
In subsequent exhibitions, Collura extended that work's methods.Weaver, Suzanne. Concentrations 32: Anne Chu and Bonnie Collura, Dallas: TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 1999. She exhibited ten multipart sculptures in "From A to C and Back Again" (Basilico, 1998), which employed shattered fragments reassembled into legible and semi-legible, candy-coated forms and multiple non-linear narratives. Sleeping Death (Martyr Yellow) (1997) revisited female transformation, Bernini's The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni and the Persephone fertility myth, combining the head and neck of a young deer and the torso and head of a swooning, Sleeping Beauty-like woman atop a pedestal heaped with corn.Berman, Jennifer. "Bonnie Collura," BOMB, Spring 1998. Retrieved March 3, 2023. The "Liberty" exhibition (Basilico, 1999) presented drawings of reconfiguring forms constructed like storyboards and similarly in-flux sculptures, such as Model for Liberty (Dorothy Gale as Jesus) (1999), which mixed erotic, natural (a stag shedding antlers) and religious (a crown of thorns) elements.
Between 2000 and 2007, in exhibitions such as "In the Gutter" (Lehmann Maupin, 2000) and "Rebel Angel" (Susan Inglett, 2003), Collura experimented with increasingly abstracted, monochrome sculptures.Smith, Roberta. "Bonnie Collura," The New York Times, January 31, 2003, p. E37. Retrieved March 2, 2023. They melded barely recognizable human and animal forms, branches, classical drapery and commedia dell'arte costuming, seemingly embattled to materialize out of central, amorphous masses (e.g., Chain Reaction, 1999).Giovannotti, Micaela. "Bonnie Collura," Teme Celeste, July–September 2000, p. 86. Reviewers characterized these works as "dramatically abject" portrayals of ecstasy or distress that suggested souls entrapped in terrestrial chaos or angels expelled into corporeality as monsters and twisted freaks of nature. New York Times critic Holland Cotter likened them to "multi-vehicle collisions ... Baroque sculpture, Disney animation and Butler's Lives of the Saints seem to have met at meltdown speed, leaving stray limbs and maimed myths protruding from the wreckage." Guardian (2003) portrayed a 21st-century Madonna with a clown's nose and an erupting hand, while Death of a Virgin (2006–11) depicted a large-eared, shattered figure on its back atop a vertical mass, as if after a great fall.
The Prince and later work Since 2005, Collura has worked on sculptures, textiles, performances, videos and installations forming The Prince Project. It consists of four parts—"Dust," "Wicked," "Seven," and "White Light"—and critiques cultural patterns that recycle iconic characters, gestures and polarizing traits into male heroes.de Guzman, Gabriel. Bonnie Collura: Prince, New York: Smack Mellon, 2019. The project originated in Collura's interest in constructing a persona or surrogate self, à la the Pygmalion, Galatea and Frankenstein myths; as a female artist-creator, however, she reverses the traditional gender relationships of those stories.