Kimberly Brooks (artist)


Kimberly Brooks is an American painter. Her work blends figuration and abstraction to focus on subjects related to memory, reality, history, representation, and identity.

Early life and education

Born Kimberly Shlain in New York City, Brooks is the daughter of Leonard Shlain, a surgeon and author, and Carol Lewis, PhD. She grew up in Mill Valley, California, and sculpted, drew, and painted as a child. She attended UC Berkeley, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Literature and graduated as valedictorian. Following her graduation, she spent a year in Paris, attending the Sorbonne, and painting. She later studied painting at UCLA and Otis College of Art and Design.

Work

Painting and multimedia

Brooks' first solo exhibition, The Whole Story, was held at the Risk Press Gallery in Los Angeles in 2006. It featured a series of "rich, segmented" paintings which investigated the role of women as artists and models. Brooks used erotic imagery and fragmentation to examine the historical glorification of women's bodies to present the female image within a feminist representation.
Brooks' second solo show, Mom's Friends, explored the feminism of the early 1960s and 1970s. The paintings in the exhibit were based on her mother and her mother's friends in Marin County, California; in addition to the original photographs, Brooks shot recreations, using friends and models in vintage clothing. The Huffington Post wrote: "Brooks’s paintings fix us at a significant time and place vis-à-vis the role of women. The explicit connection between the paintings and decades old photographs adds a provocative dimension to this conversation between past and present...Brooks creates an aesthetic of memory through the familiar, carefully framed, high contrast visions found in a photo album. In so doing, she demands that we consider both the subject of the picture and the memory of the subject itself." The Los Angeles Times wrote: “In Mom’s Friends, Venice-based painter and new media artist Kimberly Brooks explores issues of feminine identity, nostalgia and womanhood in a series of oil and gouache portraits based on photos of her mother and her fashionable 1970s friends from Brooks’ Mill Valley, California childhood. Brooks captures the era's sense of freedom and fresh power in compositions that feature bold '70s style."
Mom's Friends was followed by Technicolor Summer in 2008. Brooks began work onTechnicolor Summer after her father was diagnosed with a terminal illness. She wrote: "Every moment was more vivid because it could be the last one. It was a summer in high definition. A summer in technicolor." "As viewers, we have to disentangle the seeming realism of the scene itself from Brooks’ representation of it," Kim Biel wrote in ArtLTD. "Central to this project is the fact that Brooks’ paintings don't pretend to be absolutely transparent windows on reality; instead, they reproduce the peculiar material qualities of old photographs."
After she attended a lecture at LACMA about Elsa Schiaparelli's and Coco Chanel's influence on the paintings of Henri Matisse, Brooks began a project creating portraits of well known stylists, costume and fashion designers styling themselves and posing for portraits. Titled The Style Project, it challenged the viewer to "think about the meaning of personal style and question who is ultimately responsible for trends that take off in popular fashion." Brooks photographed her subjects in their own environments and then painted from the photographs. She continued to address questions about female beauty and fashion through more abstract portraiture with Thread in 2011, described as a "post-apocalyptic fashion show, with art direction by Tim Burton, refracted through Goya or Velazquez, and scripted by Cormac McCarthy." In 2014 she had two solo shows, I See People Disappear and I Have A King Who Does Not Speak.
In 2015, Brooks' 8-foot-tall uncoated steel pendant, “The Ephemerality of Manner,” was permanently acquired by the Cooper Building in Los Angeles' Fashion District. Using video, collage work, textile pieces, and welded steel, it was created as part of her site-specific installation “Thread and Bone." The Los Angeles Times wrote that the sculpture was "shot through with subtle complexities and contradictions traversing fashion, feminism, architecture and art history."
In September 2017, the Zevitas Marcus Gallery in Los Angeles presented Brazen, a solo exhibition of paintings Brooks began working on after the 2016 American presidential election. In an interview, she said: "I kept hearing the word in my head as I listened to the radio, mostly aghast, while I made the work. I thought of the word “Brazen” as I approached the subject of what it means to paint and make art at all." Brooks used silver and gold leaf for the first time to create "aggressively abstract" paintings that incorporate religious icons, grand interiors and ornamentation "purposefully untethered from their traditional functions and allowed to embody a greater range of meaning within our contemporary culture." Art and Cake wrote: "Conceptual and abstract, this mediation of the art historical discourse speaks to the necessity for the valuable to be unprecious, for pretense and privilege to be openly critiqued, for the eye of the artist to outweigh the conventional taste — to be both beautiful and brazen inside a modern algorithm of beauty, eccentricity, individuality, and engagement."

Teaching, writing, speaking

Brooks teaches painting at Otis College of Art and Design. In 2016, she received the Franklyn Liegel Award for Teaching Excellence. Brooks also conducts summer workshops at the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Aspen. Between 2007 and 2009, Brooks contributed more than 70 essays about art and interviewed artists for First Person Artist, her weekly column in The Huffington Post. She founded the Huffington Post Arts section in 2010 and its Science section in 2011.
Brooks delivers lectures and presentations to museums, universities and organizations on a range of subjects related to creativity and painting. In 2008 she addressed the Costume Council at LACMA about The Stylist Project. In 2011 she presented “The Creative Process in Eight Stages” at a TEDx conference. Her work has been presented in juried exhibitions organized by curators including Chris Burden, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, California Institute of the Arts, and LACMA.

Personal

Brooks lives in Los Angeles, and works out of a studio in Venice, California. She and her husband, Albert Brooks married in 1997. Together they have two children, a son and a daughter. Following her father's death, Brooks and her siblings, Tiffany Shlain and Jordan Shlain, worked together to edit the manuscript of his final book, Leonardo's Brain: Understanding Da Vinci's Creative Genius.

Solo exhibitions, publications and installations