Tama Hochbaum


Tama Hochbaum is an artist and photographer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Life

Hochbaum was born in New York City, and received her BA from Brandeis University in Fine Arts. Upon graduation, she was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship to study printmaking at Atelier 17 in Paris. She later received a MFA in painting from Queens College in NYC in 1981.
She worked as a painter in Newton, Massachusetts for 20 years.
In 1991, during a four-month stay in Italy, an old interest in photography that had begun during her time in Paris re-emerged.
In 1996, she and her family moved to North Carolina, where she currently lives.

Process

Hochbaum has always been interested in making work about the passage of time. Her recent work consists of composite photo collages, in black and white and color. She begins with a grid of between 25 and 50 photos set up in columns and rows and works digitally to blend the individual panels to make a whole, a single picture plane. She always leaves a hint of fog at the border between the modules, never making a seamless image, to remind the viewer that this is no window one is looking through, this is the act of seeing itself, over time.
Previous to this portfolio, Hochbaum created shaped images, made up of individual panels printed into aluminum. She has used three distinct shapes - the symmetrical cross, the lintel or doorway and the Bi square, the empty square, or the squaring off of the Bi disc shape. She has also produced a series on the Silver Screen. In this series, Hochbaum takes screenshots of classic movies broadcast on TV, warping images of famous Hollywood starlets before printing the image on aluminum panels. She has published a book with Daylight Books of the same name, SILVER SCREEN. Along with these series, she has created a number of slide shows to music; each contain hundreds of her images. Two of these pieces were commissioned by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One, Graffito, a collaboration with her husband the composer Allen Anderson, was screened in Memorial Hall in February 2011 as part of the North Carolina Digital Arts Festival. Another, return:radius, was screened at the FedEx Global Education Center as part of the Water of Life Festival in the Spring of 2013.
She was represented by George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco and Los Angeles for 9 years.

Exhibitions

Recent solo exhibitions include:
Recent group exhibitions include:
Hochbaum's work is held in the following public collections: