For over three decades following her education at Northwestern University and at The School of the Art Institute Of Chicago, Jill Friedberg has enjoyed national recognition as an outstanding visual artist whose works have been exhibited extensively in museums, galleries and universities throughout the United States.
During this time, she developed her inimitable style, fusing her genuine interest in people and nature with her love for expressive art forms. The result is an expression of buoyant exhilaration that is clearly manifested in each of her works.
In her current series, “Recycled Reflections, “No Shame, Beauty”, and “Penetrating Invisible Boundaries”, Jill defies the notion of art fitting into neat categories by bending, breaking and blending traditional boundaries into new art forms.
Thriving on a multicolored, multidimensional world of many choices, the work explores cultural diversity in the light of recurring natural phenomena. In each series, Friedberg confronts pre-existing perceptions of beauty as it relates to commonly shared attitudes and traditions to celebrate the unexpected discoveries that abound in nature both near and far from home.
This work integrates Friedberg’s photography and painting with a wide variety of repurposed materials: palm bark, textiles, horsehair, laundry lint, paint palette and pencil shavings, glass, wooden and metal beads that she has been obsessively collecting for many years.
Friedberg’s early work has included large-scale shaped paintings and installation art. As an artist whose commissions also include the creation of symbolic portraits, Friedberg evokes the spiritual essence of a subject without the classical constraints of the usual head portraiture.
It is Jill’s very spirit of adventure, her joie d’ vie, that led her to bike her way through much of the world, underscoring her quest for the extraordinary. She remarks, “I’m intrigued by any source that infuses daily life with beauty. Art reveals itself in the most unexpected places. It might appear on an amber colored striated dune in Morocco or in an inviting window of the neighborhood bakery.”
In addition to her work as an artist, Friedberg has curated many one person and group exhibitions, planned and coordinated cultural events, and served as a juror for many art competitions.
