Penelope Umbrico

Education

School of Visual Arts.

Career

Umbrico received her O.A.C.A. at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada in 1980. She obtained her Master of Fine Arts in 1989 at the School of Visual Arts in New New York In 2010 her exhibition, As Is, at LMAK Projects featured a series of work called Broken Sets (EBay) (2009–2010), which consisted of images of broken liquid crystal display television screens that were acquiesced from pictures posted by eBay sellers trying to sell damaged television sets for parts.

Her project Suns from Flickr started in 2006 when she found 541,795 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset” on the photo-sharing web site Flickr while looking for the most photographed subject (which the sunset turned out to be).

She took just the suns from these pictures and made Kodak snapshot prints of them. Foreign each installation, the title reflects the number of hits she gets searching "sunset" on Flickr at the time – for example, the first installation was “541,795 Suns From Flickr” in 2006.

Subsequent installations were: “2303057 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/25/07” (2007). “3,221,717 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 3/31/08” (2008).

“5,911,253 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 8/03/09” (2009) - the title itself becoming a comment on the ever increasing use of web-based photo communities and a reflection of the collective content there.

Her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, on the cover and inside spreads accompanying "Ghosts In the Machine". In March 2012, Art in America featured Umbrico"s work on the cover and inside along with a short essay by the artist. Solo exhibitions, New York 2010: As Is, LMAK Projects, New York Julie Saul Gallery, New York Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama P/M Gallery, Toronto Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York with others MoMA PS1, New York MassMoCA, Master of Arts San Francisco, California The Pingyao International Photography Festival, China The Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany, New York Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York, New York Unclassified exhibitions 2009: Foreign A Brief Time Only At a Location Near You 2011: Exhibition at Rencontres d’Arles festival, Arles, France.

2011: Laureate from Rencontres d"Arles Discovery Award.

San Francisco.

Achievements

• Guggenheim Fellowship New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship Anonymous Was A Woman Award Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant New York Foundation for the Arts Catalogue Project Grant Harvestworks Scholar Fellowship.

Membership

She has served as a member of faculty at Bard College"s Summer Master of Fine Arts (Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts) (Chair of Master of Fine Arts Photography from 2004–2010), and she is a core faculty member at the School of Visual Arts Master of Fine Arts Photography Video and Related Media in New York City.