Andrea Blum: BIOTA

Andrea Blum has worked at the intersection of art, design, and architecture for over forty years. She began making temporary installations in the mid-1970s, and in the decades since, she has created numerous public artworks for cities and universities across the United States and Europe. These include plazas, parks, mobile homes, libraries, an aviary, and sets for a Paris opera. Her exhibition designs for museums and galleries reconfigure how viewers perceive familiar spaces and one another. Blum’s sculptures frequently place bodies in proximity without the ability to touch. A tension between autonomy and intimate connection runs throughout the works. 

In BIOTA, Blum presents an exhibition environment with works from 2008–2024 that center on constructions of the natural world and relations between humans and non-humans. These include a series of drawings that simulate organic matter, experiments with furniture-like objects for interspecies observation, and videos of wildlife in which animal desire parallels our own. In these psychologically charged works, Blum uses shifts of perspective and scale to explore entanglements of the natural and social realms. An illustrated monograph to be published in early 2025 will give an overview of Andrea Blum’s work from the 1970s to the present. Designed by Joseph Logan Studio, it will include texts by Catherine Grout, Jenny Jaskey, Pam Lins, Michael Lobel, Sarah Oppenheimer, and a conversation between the artist and Allan Schwartzman. 

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Foundation To-Life Curatorial Workshop Fund, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, the Red Painters Fund, Jill Brienza, Agnes Gund, Jane Katcher, and other private donors. The publication has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Estate of Tony Feher, and a grant from the Wolf Kahn Foundation and the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation on behalf of artists Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn.

Andrea Blum: BIOTA is guest curated by Jenny Jaskey and organized by Katie Hood Morgan, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Hunter College Art Galleries, with graduate curatorial fellows Haley Kane and Antonia Oliver.

Hunter College Art Galleries
Hunter College Art Galleries under the auspices of the Department of Art and Art History, have been a vital aspect of the New York cultural landscape since their inception over a quarter of a century ago. The galleries provide a space for critical engagement with art and pedagogy, bringing together historical scholarship, contemporary artistic practice, and experimental methodology. The 205 Hudson Gallery is dedicated to presenting exhibitions and programming that examine the impact of and critical issues around contemporary art. Located in Tribeca on Hunter’s MFA Studio Art Campus, the gallery also hosts the MFA thesis exhibitions each semester.