Libby Black
Andy Warhol Love, 2025
Paper, pencil, paint, and glue
9 x 6.5 x 6 inches
22.86 x 16.51 x 15.24 cm
Libby Black: In The Studio
Watch to learn more about renowned Bay Area artist Libby Black, as she takes us through her studio, her work, and her life experiences.
Libby Black
Everything but the girl, 2025
Paper, paint and glue
25 x 11 x 6 inches
63.5 x 27.94 x 15.24 cm
Libby Black
Vans Sock, 2023
Paper, glue and acrylic paint
13 1/4 x 3 x 1 3/4 inches
33.7 x 7.6 x 4.4 cm
Libby Black
Andre Leon Talley, 2021
Acrylic paint and pencil on paper
21 x 11 1/4 inches
53.3 x 28.6 cm
Libby Black
Just Kids, Valencia, and Keep it Simple, 2023
Paper, paint and glue
13 x 9 x 2 1/2 inches
33 x 22.9 x 6.3 cm
Libby Black
Installation view of Workout at Fused Space, San Francsico, 2018
Paper, acrylic, glassless mirror and glue
Dimensions variable
Libby Black
Lesbian Art- An Encounter with Power, 2023
Paper, paint and glue
11 x 9 x 1/2 inches
27.9 x 22.9 x 1.3 cm
Libby Black
Jennifer Bartlett In The Garden, 2023
Paint on paper
23 1/2 x 18 inches
59.7 x 45.7 cm
Libby Black
Installation view from Luis Vuitton Store, 2003
Paper, acrylic, MDF, and glass
Dimensions variable
“Throughout her work, Black, with her selective eye and skillful hand, reminds us that there are important object lessons to be found amid the sea of images and stuff that floods our contemporary culture.”
- Matt Sussman, Art in America
For over two decades, Libby Black has worked across drawing, painting, and sculpture to develop a tactile language that foregrounds the material, political, and emotional dimensions of the everyday. Best known for her sculptures—rendered in paper, paint, graphite, and hot glue—she transforms familiar objects into portals that reveal the intersections of personal memory and collective cultural meaning.
While her watercolors explore impermanence, Black first gained recognition for uncanny sculptural approximations of domestic and luxury objects, transforming the material world into reflections on desire, value, and representation. Through the portrayal of domestic objects, Black surfaces the interactions and narratives embedded within everyday life, encompassing cultural, historical, and personal realms. Black’s sculptural recreations of books and periodicals—a recurring thread first introduced in the artist’s life-size re-creation of a Kate Spade store, of which included an Andy Warhol book—extend the artist’s researched yet intuitive inquiry into the systems and symbols that shape our lives. Over the years, these hollow, hand-built volumes have evolved into an ongoing series, reanimating art history through a feminist perspective to foreground alternative knowledge-making, experimentation, and counter-histories.
Libby Black (b. 1976, Toledo, OH) lives and works in Berkeley, CA. Black holds a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from the California College of the Arts. The artist is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with such shows as “California Love” at Galerie Droste in Wupertal, Germany; “Bay Area Now 4” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; “California Biennial” at the Orange County Museum of Art; and at numerous galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Recent solo exhibitions include The Way Things Also Are, The David Ireland House, San Francisco (2022); Returning to this Moment, Gallery 16, San Francisco (2022); Little Girl Blue, Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco (2018); A Light That Never Goes Out, Gallery 16, San Francisco (2016); and There's No Place Like Home, Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, (2015). Select group exhibitions include In Flux, Koumi-machi Kogen Museum of Art in Koumi, Japan (2025); What’s That About, Anthony Meier, Mill Valley (2023); Fight and Flight: Crafting A Bay Area Life, The Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco (2023); Ways of Seeing: Sports and Games, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham (2022); Chronicles 3 Group Show, Galerie Droste, Berlin (2021); Copycat, Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University, San Francisco (2019); Closer Look: Intimate-Scale Sculpture from the Permanent Collection, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2019); and Post 11/9 The New Now [NOW], Connect Gallery, Chicago (2018) among others.
Black has been in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA; and Spaces in Cleveland, OH. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, and The New York Times. She received a BFA from Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999 and an MFA at the California College of the Arts in 2001. Black is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award Finalist.
Select public collections include The Annette Bollag-Rothschild Collection, Kusnacht, Switzerland; The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, New York, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; The Chaney Family Collection, Houston, TX; Fidelity Investments Corporate Contemporary Art Collection, Boston, MA; Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York, NY; The McEvoy Family Collection, San Francisco, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and The West Collection, Philadelphia, PA.
Koumi-machi Kogen Museum of Art will be holding an exhibition entitled "In Flux," in which five American artists and one Japanese artist will be working in Komi-machi.
Each artist will use materials that are considered non-artistic, such as plastic waste, industrial by-products, and animals exterminated as harmful birds and animals, which change and circulate in different ways. They will reinterpret the materials in the context of various social issues and personal histories, creating a space for us to notice the beauty and extraordinary nature of objects in our everyday lives. The idea that everything in the world is always changing, that it will continue to change forever and live forever, is the underlying attitude shared by each artist. The works contain memories and stories, and by empathizing with their basic beliefs and desires, we will be encouraged to reconsider our relationship with our ever-changing environment and objects, and to consider what it means to live.
Reshaping the Narrative: California Perspectives surveys the myriad ways artists represent and reflect our local communities. The featured artists offer unique and local perspectives on themes that resonate during this presidential election year, such as immigration, civil rights, labor activism, feminism, and cultural identity.
This exhibition features works by eleven contemporary artists from around the globe to explore how these individuals engage with topics such as resilience, strength, labor, women’s rights, and queer aesthetics through athletic imagery. It also queries preconceived notions of femininity through a range of conceptual approaches, be they celebratory, humorous, or critical.
Artists featured in this exhibition are Bianca Argimón, Libby Black, Zoë Buckman, Monica Kim Garza, Riikka Hyvonen, Sophie Kirchner, Eddie Lanieri, Hazel Meyer, Fay Sanders, Sheena Rose, and Kawita Vatanajyankur.
She’s a Knockout was guest curated by Caitlin Swindell, Chief Curator, Vero Beach Museum of Art.
