Barbara Grossman studied at Yale, The Akademie Der Künste (Munich) and received her BFA from Cooper Union. Her longest affiliation was with the Bowery Gallery (NY) an artists’ cooperative of which she was a founding member and exhibited regularly until 2007. She has shown in many galleries and universities around the country including the Wadsworth Atheneum, Dartmouth, New York Studio School, Gross McCleaf and Tulsa University.
She has taught at Yale, University of Pennsylvania, New York Studio School, Brandeis University, Brooklyn College, Chautauqua School of Art, Mt. Gretna School of Art, Dartmouth College, Boston University, Colby College and the Vermont Studio Center. She is a recipient of a Fulbright/Hays grant, two grants from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. And she has received three purchase prizes from the National Academy of Design.
Grossman paints women in interior spaces filled with richly patterned rugs, still-lifes, tables, windows and occasional dogs or cats. The spaces are skewed to encompass the tension of being both near and far. We are not in ‘house beautiful’ but rather the formal realm of abstract expressionism, which was the context of her education as a painter. These interiors and figures are imagined, not painted from models and props. She writes: “the interaction of color and space is my subject…. The figures create their own space and are defined by it. The color both participates in this as well as generates it. It is characteristically bright and luminous.” Grossman lives and works in New York. She was married to the painter Charles Cajori (1921-2013).
