Faculty

Artist Statement

My practice explores the space between the functional object and our changing, collective political experience. Working across media in labor intensive techniques like weaving, crocheting, stacking, I immerse myself in process. Using repurposed everyday materials, I create hybrid objects and sculptural installations for the audience to experience. I use color and tactility of material to engage the viewers senses and emotions.

Through these active explorations I hope to challenge standard assumptions about hierarchies as I playfully approach meaning. Searching for connectivity and humor, I find it in odd places; the space between art and fashion, between two and three dimensions, between the symbolic and the literal, the public and the private. By foregrounding the imaginative, the unexpected and the joyful, my aim is to invite the audience to discover their own layers of meaning.

Biography

Marta Baumiller was born in Poland and has travelled the world before settling in the US. She received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and Maryland College of Art, and completed her MFA at Stony Brook University. She has been a costume maker, fashion designer, milliner, lamp and product designer. She presently works across media with a focus on project-based art installations. Her interests center on merging the functional object with process, form, and politics. She incorporates the viewer experientially in playful challenges of accepted social norms. Marta’s work, in all its various forms, can be found in galleries, hotels, and stores around the globe from The Straw Hat Restaurant in Anguilla to Salesforce offices in Silicon Valley and Westin Hotels worldwide. Her work has also been published in the New York Times, Wallpaper and Interior Design Magazine among others. She has recently exhibited at the Zuccaire Gallery at Stony Brook’s Staller Center for the Arts, Serendip Gallery in Kobe Japan, ArtsWestchester, SUNY Chancellors Gallery in Albany, Farmingdale State College and Portal: GI, Governor’s Island, NYC. Marta currently lives and works with her husband and fellow artist in a renovated barn studio on the North Fork of Long Island. martabaumiller.com