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Barbara Bloom (born 1951) is an American photographer, designer, and installation artist. Her work centers on themes of questioning appearances, exploring the desire for possessions, and commenting on the act of collecting. She studied at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles under various well-known artists including John Baldessari, Robert Irwin and James Lee Byars^[1]. Bloom's work is heavily influenced by psychoanalytic theory. She draws on classic Hollywood movie culture in a number of ways, often appropriating film footage in her own videos or invoking a cinematic atmosphere in her installations.

Greed (1988): Bloom often integrates her photographs with furniture to create compelling scenes. This installation is comprised of a chair, an empty frame, and her own photograph of a museum gallery showing a guard in a chair.

“The Reign of Narcissism” (1990): Held at the Serpentine Gallery in London, the installation was set in a neo-Classical period room in an imaginary museum dedicated to one Barbara Bloom. There were faux-antique marble busts portraying Ms. Bloom; fine teacups watermarked with her image; a 38-volume set of “The Complete Works of Barbara Bloom”; a tombstone with a carved epitaph that said, “She traveled the world to seek beauty” and many more artifacts testifying to the transcendent qualities of a great artist.^[2]

The Tip of the Iceberg (1991): Jay Gorney Modern Art, New York, NY

Pictures From The Floating World (1995): Leo Castelli Gallery,

“Broken” (2001): Each work is composed of a piece of Japanese ceramic ware that was repaired with gold lacquer, an X-ray of that object, a found photograph of a performing acrobat in a frame with shattered glazing, and a beautiful Japanese-style paper container for the ceramic piece. Bloom created the series after falling out of a window and breaking many bones. In the overly busy context of the show, that poignant, personal dimension is lost.

“The Collections of Barbara Bloom” (2008): This retrospective explored all aspects of her oeuvre, and includes works from past multi-media installations and newly made pieces, as well as objects from her vast personal archives of ephemera and advertisements. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations and adds new elements, resisting the delineation between past and present in her work. An example of one of her "collections" is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov's writings, with all the book covers redesigned by Bloom. This refers not only to herself as collector, and Nabokov as collector (he obsessively collected his own books), but herself as artist. In contrast to the walk-in theatrical installations for which Bloom is best known, this installation displays pieces from various phases of her career as discrete works of sculpture, assemblage, collage, photography and design. The exhibition assumes an ironic, overarching view of the artist as an eccentric, narcissistic collector and curator of her own history,

As it were ... So to speak (2013): Inspired in part by Talmudic discourse, in which discussions and commentaries take place across place and time, Bloom uses the paneled rooms of the former Warburg Mansion as both museum and home filled with imagined historical guests. Walking through the galleries, visitors encounter furniture-like display cases holding works from the collection. For example, a gaming table houses a Dreyfus Affair game board and ancient Roman dice. Marriage and divorce contracts cover a bed-shaped display case and an analyst's consultation room holds Sigmund Freud's cigar box. The juxtaposition of artworks, found texts and Bloom's writing in the “tableaux” evoke dialogues between people. Visitors encounter Albert Einstein and Marcel Proust discussing the passage of time, or eavesdrop on Duke Ellington and Marilyn Monroe speaking about synesthesia, the mind's mingling of sensory information. ^[3]