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Penelope Umbrico attended Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada, and received her M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. She has had numerous solo exhibitions of her work, including at the International Center of Photography, NY; LMAKprojects, NY; Julie Saul Gallery, NY; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; P/M Gallery, Toronto; and her work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY; Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; Art in General, NY; Gallery 44, Toronto; Dazibao, Montreal; Ansel Adams Center for Photography, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA. Umbrico’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; International Center of Photography; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Columbia College of Chicago Photography Museum 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, and guest faculty at Harvard, MA. In 2011 her catalogue with an overview of her work was published by Aperture.

Penelope Umbrico’s work is as much a study of photography as it is photography. She looks for images in the public realm that depict ideas of beauty, status, intimacy and love – specifically those images that elicit desire. The focus is on publicly accessible often corporate, or corporate-sponsored “private” spaces promoting idealized life-styles. Through re-photographing, scan, and screen-capture, Umbrico selects details in the images that point to a deflation or rupture in the idealized fictions. Collecting, compiling, de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing this material, makes Umbrico a 21st Century archivist, and through her re-appropriation of the imagery the viewer is confronted with a new perceived value, meaning and function.
Cultural manifestations of absence and erasure are a constant theme in this work, especially with regard to technologies that promise visibility, community and intimacy, such as photography and the Internet in turn questioning the idea of the democratization of media

As Is
Salon Zurcher, Paris
PULSE Miami

TVs For Sale/TVs From Craigslist
(Photographs)

2012
CNN
hyperallergic.com
Art in America (cover)

2011
Artforum, 500 words

2010
Art in America, Faye Hirsch, November 2010

Deutsche Bank Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Washington Post

Rhizome at the New Museum by Jacob Gaboury

The Brooklyn Rail by Patricia Milder.

Foam

Village Voice for BAM

NYTimes