Cynthia Carlson

Carlson was born in 1942 in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago and then attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received her BFA in 1965. She moved to New York City and attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, graduating with her MFA in 1967.[1] She is married to Robert Gino Bertoletti.

In the 1960s, Carlson's art was influenced by the work of The Hairy Who and Chicago Imagists artists in Chicago early on. Later, during the 1970s, she was a pioneer of the "Pattern and Decoration" group in New York City, in which the Feminist movement played an important role. Mainly a painter, her work has evolved within a number of different stylistic concerns including installation, sculpture, and public art commissions.

Carlson's career has included nine solo museum exhibitions and forty-seven one woman exhibits, including galleries in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. She has had several public art commissions, and numerous group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the US, Canada and Europe. In 1977, she was invited to participate in a sculpture exhibition at Artpark, in Lewiston NY, where she built and decorated a life sized gingerbread house, 13-feet high.

She taught for 40 years, first at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and later at Queens College, CUNY, where she is Professor Emeritus. She also served for more than twenty years on the Artist Advisory Committee of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. She has lived in Italy for a year at a time on several occasions, as well as traveling extensively in Europe and elsewhere.

In the early 70s, for several years, she traveled throughout the United States documenting Environmental Folk Art and lectured extensively on the material. In 2012, she donated the entire collection of visuals and documents to the L'Art Brut Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland.

• 1993 Foundation Award, Residency for Study And Conference Center, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center, Bellagio, Italy
• 1975,1978 & 1987 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship[2]
• 1978 Creative Artists Public Service Grant, New York
• 1977 Natural Heritage Trust Artist-in-Residence Grant, Artpark, Lewiston, NY[3]
• 1976 The MacDowell Colony Fellowship

• 1971-1972 Associate Professor, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
• 1967-1987 Professor, University of the Arts (Philadelphia) (formerly Philadelphia Colleges of the Arts), Philadelphia, PA
• 1987-2005 Professor Emeritis, Queens College, City University of New York, Flushing

• Broude, Norma and Mary Garrard. The Power of Feminist Art. New York: Abrams, Inc., 1994
• Brown, Betty Ann and Arlene Raven. Exposures: Women & Their Art. Pasadena, CA: New Sage Press, 1989
• Gould, Claudia & Valerie Smith, ed. 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years. 1998: Artists Space, NY
• Jensen, Robert and Patricia Conway. Ornamentalism. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1982
• Johnson, Ellen H., ed. American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980, New York: Harper & Row,1982
• Lippard, Lucy. From The Center: Feminists Essays on Women's Art. New York: Dutton, Inc.,1976
• Lippard, Lucy. The Pink Glass Swan. New York: The New Press, 1995
• Robbins, Corrine. The Pluralist Era --American Art, 1968 -1981. New York: Harper & Row, 1984
• Rubin, David. Cynthia Carlson: Installations, 1979-1989 (A Decade, More or Less). Reading, PA: Freedman Gallery, Albright College, 1989
• Sandler, Irving. Art of the Postmodern Era, From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s. New York: IconEditions, 1996
• Sandler, Irving. A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir. New York: Thames & Hudson. 2003
• Taylor, Brandon. Avant-Garde And After, New York: Abrams, Inc. 1995
• Van Wagner, Judith. Women Shaping Art: Profiles in Power. New York: Praeger, 1984
• Westbrook, Adele. A Creative Legacy. A history of the National Endowment for the Arts, Visual Artists' Fellowship

• Cynthia Carlson's web site