Judy Pfaff was born in London in 1946 and moved with her family to the United States when she was thirteen. She received her BFA from Washington University in 1971 and her MFA from Yale University just two years later. Pfaff was a printmaking major as an undergraduate and also assisted in the printmaking department at Yale, but came to feel that the medium had too many rules. She spent several years in California, where she taught at CalArts, before moving to New York in 1979. Never truly confined to one medium, Pfaff describes her work as fast moving, always changing, “a kind of peripheral experience.” She tends to merge processes and materials in the making of drawings, prints and sculptures.
Pfaff is internationally acclaimed and has been the subject of countless one-person exhibitions since the 1970s. Her first solo exhibition was held at the John Doyle Gallery in 1975. Other notable exhibitions include “Elephant” at the Rose Art Museum in 1995, “Outside/Inside/Landscapes” at the 24th International Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1998, “Buckets of Rain” at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art in 2006, “…All of the Above” at the Rice University Art Gallery in 2007, “Explosivity” at the Bruno David Gallery in 2012, the concurrent exhibitions “Run Amok” at the Loretta Howard Gallery and “Second Nature” at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in 2014, and most recently, “SCENE I: The Garden, Enter Mrs Barnes,” part of the three-person exhibition “The Order of Things” at the Barnes Foundation in 2015. Her work is represented in important public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Pfaff has been the recipient of numerous major honors and awards including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She is also a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 1994, Pfaff has taught at Bard College, where she is the Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts. She lives and works in upstate New York.
