Mia Pearlman

Mia Pearlman’s mixed-media works The World Below the Brine are made with cut and painted paper, into which the artist incorporates elements of “ghost gear”—waste pieces of fishing nets, rope, and tackle salvaged from oceans around the world. The free-flowing and often turbulent forms of her pieces evoke the drama of the ocean, as well as the brutality of humankind’s impact on the natural world. The remarkable fluidity and invention of the artist’s work echoes the depiction of water and waves in Japanese woodblock art, just as Pearlman’s visually ravishing forms channel the imaginative richness and “other spheres” of the Walt Whitman poem after which the series is titled.

Courtesy of the artist and JHB Gallery, New York

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mia Pearlman has exhibited internationally in numerous galleries, non-profit spaces and museums, including the MSU Broad Art Museum (Michigan), Museum of Arts and Design (NYC), Goyang Aram Gallery (South Korea), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Manchester Art Gallery (UK).

Pearlman is also a founder and co-leader of True Blue NY, a progressive grassroots organization that in 2018 was instrumental in defeating the IDC, a breakaway conference of 8 NY state senators who blocked progressive legislation in every area by giving Republicans control of the state senate. TBNY helped drive many groundbreaking legislative wins in 2019 and 2020. As a result of this work, activists from Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC) were able to pass the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act (HALT), limiting the use of solitary confinement to no more than 15 days.

Permanent commissions include large-scale, site-specific sculptures for Liberty Mutual's headquarters in Boston, the 80th Street A Train station for the MTA in Queens, New York, MGM Springfield in Springfield, MA, Zhongshan Huafa Plaza in China, and Baptist Medical Clay in Fleming Island, FL, as well as paper installations and sculptures for Leon Max (London) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (NY).

Her work has been featured in over 25 books on contemporary art, and in both international and domestic press, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New York Post, and The Boston Globe. Pearlman has also appeared on PBS Thirteen’s SundayArts, the Smithsonian Channel, Spain’s TV3, and NY1.

Pearlman has participated in several residency programs and has been the recipient of many grants, including a 2011 Artist Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the 2011 Robert Sterling Clark Visual Arts Space Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2008), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2008) and an Established Artist Fellowship from UrbanGlass (2009).

Pearlman lives and works in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and artistic collaborator, Catalan pianist and composer Albert Marques, and their two children.