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Between the Falling in Love Parts

Phyllis Bramson is a Chicago-based artist whose career reflects the Imagist tradition for which the city is known. Bramson’s work was recently featured in a 30-year retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center, following decades of group exhibitions at museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian Institution; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and solo exhibitions at smaller museums around the country. She is the recipient of numerous grants, including the John S. Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Grants, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fullbright. 

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Bramson’s painting and mixed media pieces are characterized by an eclectic mix of influences, blending the pop culture and irreverence of Chicago Imagism with eastern religious image, cartoons, and decorative pattern. In addition to her two-dimensional pieces, she has also executed a variety of three-dimensional assemblages.

Phyllis Bramson was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1941. She received her BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a MA from the University of Wisconsin. She moved to Illinois where she was an iconic window designer for Marshall Fields. She also taught at the Chicago Academy of Art and Columbia College and completed a MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973. Her work achieved wide recognition and she joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1985, teaching there until retiring in 2007. She has been represented by galleries around the country and curated a major survey of Post-Imagist Chicago artists at the Elmhurst Art Museum in 2019-2020.