Location: Benicia, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Drawing
Website: lindaflemingsculpture.com
Linda Fleming was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She studied at Carnegie Mellon University (1963–66) on a full scholarship and subsequently attended the San Francisco Art Institute (1966–67). In 1967 she relocated to New York City, where her work was included in the final exhibition of Park Place Gallery, a cooperative founded by artists including Mark di Suvero. The following year she co-founded Libre, an intentional artists’ community in the high desert of southern Colorado, where she has continued to maintain a studio. Fleming settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and has lived and worked in Benicia, California for decades, where her primary production studio, The Brewery, is located.
Since 1986 Fleming has been a faculty member at California College of the Arts in Oakland, where she served as Chair of the Sculpture Department from 1988 to 2000 and was later named Professor Emeritus. She has also held teaching positions at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco State University, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her awards include the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Educator Award (2016), the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant (2007), the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2007), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1993), and the Distinguished Faculty Award from California College of the Arts (1993).
Fleming’s work is held in the collections of the Oakland Museum of California, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, the Albuquerque Museum, the Laumeier Sculpture Park, the Nevada Museum of Art, and American Embassies in Baghdad and Amman. She is represented by Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco.
Fleming works primarily in steel — laser-cut and powder-coated in contrasting colors — as well as wood, rubber, felt, and paper. Her sculptures are distinguished by intricate, latticed structures whose layered geometries evoke lace, smoke tendrils, or organic webs. Each work opposes its interior and exterior surfaces in contrasting hues, creating deliberate ambiguity about inside and outside space; parallel bars sliced into panel sections produce shifting optical effects as light and shadow move across the surfaces. Drawing is an equally sustained component of her practice: her large-scale works on paper deploy sinuous wave-forms and Op Art-inflected geometries that generate perceptual disorientation similar to that of her three-dimensional work.
Fleming organizes her output in sustained series, each exploring a coherent set of materials, formal concerns, or conceptual anchors. She has described her practice as exploring “the co-existence of the mundane and the cosmological to create a place where two realities simultaneously exist,” and characterizes her sculptures as “diagrams of thought” that give physical form to the intersection of history, memory, and scientific inquiry. Recurring series include Modeling the Universe, Evanescent, Aerious, Intertwined, and Figment.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.