About

Diana Baumbach is a visual artist, educator and curator based in Orono, Maine.

Biography

Originally from Oak Park, IL (USA), Diana Baumbach earned her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis (2003) and her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale (2007). She has had recent solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina, Colorado State University, Arte Mare (Finland) and Naropa University. Diana has undertaken public art projects in the US and the Netherlands, mainly geared towards young audiences. She received two Visual Art Fellowships from the Wyoming Arts Council (2015, 2021) after receiving Honorable Mention three times (2011, 2013 and 2014). She recently spent a year in Finland where she was an artist in residence at Stundars Museum and Novia University. Diana was formerly an Associate Professor and Foundations Coordinator at the University of Wyoming and is currently an Assistant Professor and Director of Galleries at the University of Maine.

About the Work

Diana Baumbach’s creative work is rooted in the act of manual labor and daily practice. She explores intersections between art, craft and everyday life.

Process and materiality are central to her work. Diana employs repetitive - sometimes obsessive - actions such as piercing, punching, stitching and folding to generate patterns. Patterns appeal to the human desire to find order, yet, when made by hand they highlight the tension between repetition and error. Diana builds patterns by developing a simple gesture which becomes automatic to her body over time.

These repetitive processes allow her the ability to start and stop. As such, her studio travels home to be worked on while participating in day-to-day domestic activities, not unlike quilting or knitting. Diana considers the home a generative space in which important labor, skill and dialogue take place, but often remain unseen and undervalued. As Lucy Lippard observes “What is popularly seen as ‘repetitive,’ ‘obsessive,’ and ‘compulsive’ in women’s art is in fact a necessity for those whose time comes in small squares.”[1]

[1] Lippard, Lucy. “Up, Down, and Across: A New Frame for New Quilts.” The Artist and the Quilt. Ed. Charlotte Robinson. New York: Knopf, 1983.

diana.baumbach@gmail.com