Foam Magazine #21 / MERGE / Penelope Umbrico

Penelope Umbrico was born in * in * and currently lives and works in New York.

She attended Ontario Collage of Art in Toronto and received her M.F.A at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has had several solo exhibitions at galleries, including the International Center of Photography in New York. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group shows, in venues such as: the Museum of Modern Art, in New York and the Ansel Adams Center for Photography, in California. Penelope Umbrico’s work is a part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Catalogue Project Grant, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant and a Harvestworks Scholar Fellowship. She is currently core faculty at the School of Visual Arts, MFA Photography and Related Media program in NYC and the Chair of MFA Photography at Bard College.

Penelope Umbrico is a photographer who often re-uses published images from magazines, ads or internet. The overwhelming flow of imagery that surrounds us in daily life is her working tool. The series Broken Sets (eBay) are cropped images of broken LCD TV screens for sale on eBay. The abstract, beautiful patterns almost remind us of modernist paintings. By collecting, appropriating and re-contextualizing images from internet sites, Penelope Umbrico redefines the question of authorship and ultimately the notion of art.