Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, sculpture, drawing
Website: libbyblack.com
Libby Black was born in 1976 in Toledo, Ohio. She earned a BFA in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1999 and an MFA in painting and drawing from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2001. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area ever since, and is currently based in Berkeley, where she is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University.
Black first drew wide attention in the early 2000s for a body of work born from a simple confession: a longing to own a particular Louis Vuitton handbag she couldn’t afford. Rather than buy it, she built it — out of paper, acrylic paint, and hot glue — and the gesture became a career-defining method. She went on to construct life-sized paper replicas of luxury goods, storefronts, and domestic objects, exhibiting them in still-life arrangements that examine consumerism, value, and desire. Her work has been shown at the Orange County Museum of Art, the McNay Art Museum, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and in a site-specific solo exhibition at the David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco.
Over two decades, Black has received a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award (2002), a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant (2003), and residencies at Montalvo Arts Center, SPACES in Cleveland, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. In 2024 she was named a finalist for SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award. Her work is held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and the Oakland Museum of California, among others.
Black’s signature technique — painstakingly hand-built sculptures of paper, graphite, acrylic paint, and hot glue — turns disposable materials into uncanny, life-sized stand-ins for objects of status and habit: designer handbags, roller skates, magazines, brooms, medicine bottles. The fragility of the material is the point; these are not durable trophies but tender, handmade facsimiles that foreground labor, longing, and the gap between an object’s cultural weight and its physical flimsiness.
Beneath the pop surface, her practice threads together feminism, LGBTQ+ identity, addiction, and domestic memory. Recent projects have turned that lens inward and outward at once — inserting queer, feminist narratives into inherited spaces (as in her intervention at the David Ireland House) and reconstructing hollowed-out books and periodicals that stage alternative, counter-canonical art histories. Across two decades, Black’s work insists that the most intimate objects — the ones people covet, hoard, or quietly discard — carry a full record of who we are.
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