Biography

BIOGRAPHY

Tara was born in New York, New York in 1969, and she still lives in New York today. She received her B.F.A at the Corcoran College of Art and Design (1991), and an M.F.A in sculpture from the Virginia Commonwealth University(1999).

She has had many exhibitions with her first solo show in 1998. 

"Her most recent solo exhibitions have been mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2003), Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, TX (2003), the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2004), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (2004), and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO (2006), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2007)".

-THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART/BOSTON

(http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/donovan/artist-bio/)

Tara worked as a waitress for many years until 2003, when her first major show in New York proved to be a huge success. 

Click Here to see a list of Donovan's one-person exhibitions.

Click Here to see a list of solo and group exhibitions ad well as rankings over the years.

FAMILY

Tara and her Husband in their Williamsburg Home
Photograph by Bobby Fisher

Tara Donovan is married to the architect Robbie Crawford, and they have two year old twin boys.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

There is nothing quite like hearing an artist talk about their own work. It's extremely interesting to find out what they were thinking when they were coming up with ideas, how the pieces came to be, and what the artwork means to the artist. The artist's statement sums up the artist's work as a whole, providing the artist's view on the process of creating art and the choice of their subject matter.

Here are two artist's statements that Tara has written concerning her work:

"My investigations into the properties of different media each address a specific trait that is unique to a given mass-produced material. By experimenting with the more phenomenological aspects of a material, my process develops through a kind of dialogue that leads to a specific repetitive action (e.g. stacking, bundling, heaping, etc.) that builds the work. The breadth and diversity of the consumer landscape has expanded to such a degree that the supply of materials that can be adapted to an artistic context seems limitless. The idea that art can be manufactured or that it can radically complicate the standard notions of value attached to mass-produced objects is no longer a point of serious contention in contemporary debates. I think the new fertile territory, for myself at least, encompasses a range of practices that capitalize on the iconic identities of commercial and industrial materials by pressing them further into the realm of abstract seduction. I prefer the phras e "site-responsive" to describe the affiliation of my works to the spaces they inhabit. While this term makes a convenient allusion to the chameleonic visuals I prefer to exploit, it also suggests a dependence on the architectural particulars and lighting conditions of a given space that environmentally impact the growth of my work in terms of scale, direction, and orientation. This reliance on spatial conditions is primarily responsible for forming the understanding of my works as "fields" of visual activity, which have been compared to everything from landscapes to biomorphic forms and even cellular structures."
-[http://www.idontlikemondays.us/2009/03/tara-donovan.html] 

"I develop systems based on the physical properties and structural capabilities of a singular, accumulated material. The unit is then reproduced according to given special conditions and collected in various ways to discover how it behaves visually in a population. The final form evolves organically from the material itself via its innate properties and structure. Installed specifically for each exhibition space, these forms function as fields of visual activity"
-New York Foundation for the Arts
http://www.nyfa.org/nyfa_artists_detail.asp?pid=5013