Barbara Owen is a multidisciplinary artist whose current work combines abstraction and personal ephemera to interrogate the relationships that break and form between them. Mixing mediums, they function together as a kind of collective memory, one that transgresses boundaries between one and the other, as a mother, feminist, and artist.
She graduated with an interdivisional BA in Sculpture and Poetry from Bennington College, VT, and has an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY.
Her most recent solo exhibitions include I need a guru, TSA GLV, Ashton, NC., Simile + Metaphor: Red Necklace, Beard & Weil Galleries at Wheaton College, Norton, MA (2018), Vivid Forms:Cut paper and Installation at the Teaching Gallery at HVCC, Troy, NY (2017) and Tangible Lines, Lionheart Gallery, Pound Ridge, NY (2017) Her work has been featured at numerous venues, including the 2019 Wheaton Biennial, The Arts Center, Troy, NY, SVA Flatiron Gallery, New York, NY, Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI, Jamestown Art Center, Jamestown RI and UMass Dartmouth’s Art Gallery, New Bedford, MA. In 2016 two paintings were included in exhibitions with the Arts in Embassies (AIE) program, one in Ports Moresby, Papua New Guinea and another in the permanent collection at the American Embassy in Paramaribo, Suriname.
She has been awarded residencies nationwide, including Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, CA (2000), Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, NY (2002), and MASS MoCA/Assets for Artists, MA (2015).
She lives and works in Rhode Island and Brooklyn, New York
instagram: @babsowen