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Linda Weintraub

In addition to being an artist, Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, and author of several popular books about contemporary art. After a brief career as a dancer, she earned an MFA degree from Rutgers University in ceramic sculpture. Her current art practice engages the plants, animals, soils, insects, and microbes she cultivates on her homestead in upstate New York.

Her recent writings explore the vanguard intersection between art and environmentalism, including the series, Avant-Guardians: Textlets in Art and Ecology and TO LIFE! Eco Art In Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (University of California Press), and the forthcoming book, WHAT’s NEXT? Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art. Weintraub established Artnow Publications in order to apply environmental responsibility to the book’s material production.

She is also the author of In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society. Weintraub received her MFA degree from Rutgers University. She served as the Director of the Bard College museum where she curated over sixty exhibitions; was the Henry Luce Professor of Emerging arts at Oberlin College; is a visiting artist at the NOMAD9 MFA program at Hartford University’; and maintains a homestead on an eleven acre property in upstate New York where she actively applies the principles of Permaculture to food production, land management, and energy generation.

Linda Weintraub “Welcome to My Woods” 2017 Interactive installation at UCLA Moss, bones, feathers, twigs, honey comb, etc.
Linda Weintraub “Welcome to My Woods” 2017 Graphic from interactive installation
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  1. […] Linda Weintraub is, among many, many other things, a homesteader. She continually asks, “what can land be besides beautiful,” and says that she experienced “an impulse” around a decade ago “to reconnect with the material world.” Weintraub reconsidered her dependence and relationship with mass production and technology as well as carefully examining her impact on the environment. This led her to begin homesteading and has informed her work as an artist, curator, teacher, and author. Weintraub offers residencies to MFA students and others during which they explore art through the context of environmentalism. She has a strong affinity for the connection between materialism and contemporary art and has been working to define and establish this connection within the larger academic framework. “So often when the subject of reducing your demands on the environment…is couched in terms of sacrifice and diminishment of pleasure,” Weintraub says. Through her art, she introduces viewers to a source of joy that is structured through a non-typical modern lifestyle. Cost, both to the environment and the human spirit, play heavily in her work. […]

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