Laurie Fendrich

Known for her intriguing combinations of playfulness and rigor, Laurie Fendrich — a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts — merges an acute sense of the present with deep knowledge of the past. Her richly colored, geometric works pay homage to an earlier modernism, but are entirely their own 21st century selves.

Fendrich was born in Paterson, NJ, and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Mount Holyoke College in 1970 before turning to painting. She received an MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. In 1985, Fendrich was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in painting. Her work has been the subject of solo gallery exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Vancouver, and Cincinnati, among other cities, and she is represented in several private collections.

Fendrich has been a visiting artist at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France, the Siena Art Institute, Italy, and at the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, CA. She has also participated in invited lectures and panels at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM, and the University of California Davis.

A Professor Emerita of Fine Arts at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, Fendrich has also written extensively about art and other cultural matters for The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Common Review, and the Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation. The artist is based in New York.