Which art books, prints and posters are available by and about this artist? Here is a sample of items of interest to a typical collector:
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Penelope Umbrico (born 1957, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American visual artist internationally recognized for her photo-based works, installations, and digital interventions that examine the production, circulation, and consumption of images on the web and social media.
Umbrico’s practice directly aligns with the Bushwick sur Seine archive’s focus on a formalist approach to photography and mechanical reproducibility. She functions as an archivist and critical observer of mass visual culture. Rather than using a camera to capture new subjects, she utilizes existing photographic data, aggregating thousands of images uploaded to platforms like Flickr, eBay, Craigslist, and search engines. Her practice explores the following themes:
- Mechanical & Digital Reproducibility: Umbrico aggregates and re-contextualizes found visual tropes, exposing how consumer algorithms, web interfaces, and digital compression shape contemporary vision.
- Physical Materiality of Digital Media: She translates low-resolution web files and screen artifacts into physical prints, artist books, and large-scale installations, interrogating the boundary between virtual images and physical objects.
- Technical & Chromatic Aberrations: She focuses on screen glitches, camera app filters, light leaks, and printing inconsistencies to highlight the underlying mechanics of image technologies.
Key Series & Publications include:
Based in New York City, Umbrico holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at major global institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the International Center of Photography (ICP), SFMOMA, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art.
Her works are included in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship.
