Barbara Sullivan - February 2022

Barbara Sullivan is a painter/sculptor and installation artist living in Maine. She works in the age–old medium of fresco, which she learned when she was the head cook at The Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. 

Her work satirizes and celebrates the monotony of everyday life. 

Sullivan’s frescoes are both strange and familiar, tidy and off kilter, tragic and ebullient. The individual shaped fresco objects she makes work well individually, but she often groups them in narrative thematic scenarios using the wall as her ground. Her use of the age-old medium places Sullivan’s work firmly in the medium of painting yet they are individual bas-relief objects which exist simultaneously as sculpture. She attempts to bridge these two disciplines.  

Sullivan attended Monserrat School of Art in Beverly, MA, she holds a B.A. in Art and Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington and an M.F.A. from Vermont College in Montpelier, VT. She teaches drawing foundations at The University of Maine Farmington. She also teaches fresco workshops, including, The Aspen Institute, The Farnsworth Museum, Haystack Mountain School, Pratt Institute, Bowdoin, Colby, and The University of Maine. 

Barbara has been included in several Biennial Exhibitions at The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME, and The Center for Maine Contemporary Art Rockport, ME. In 2007 she had her first solo Museum Exhibition, at The University of Maine Museum, Bangor, ME. She has shown in many group exhibitions in Maine and New England as well as in NY that include Morgan Rank Gallery, East Hampton, NY and "Fresh/Fresco", an exhibit at Ernest Rubenstein Gallery, “Fresco, Off The Wall” at The Hudson Guild Gallery, and at Safe Gallery in Brooklyn.  in New York City.  She is a recipient of both the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant and a Pollock/Krasner Grant.

Barbara is Represented by Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, ME.