Barbara Nessim (born 1939, Bronx, NY) is a New York based artist and illustrator whose career spans six decades. Her practice encompasses fine art and illustration - constantly challenging and subverting the perceived separation between the fields. In the early 1960s, Nessim was one of the first full-time professional women illustrators working in the United States. She produced designs for many top publications including The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time, New York and Esquire. Nessim began to teach illustration at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York in 1967. She subsequently served as the Chair of the Department of Illustration at Parsons in New York for over a decade. Nessim was awarded the Pratt Lifetime Achievement Award and was recently inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. At the dawn of the computer age, Nessim was one of the first artists of note to begin using the computer as an artistic tool. She taught in the Master's degree program in digital illustration at SVA and fostered widespread adoption of digital technologies as the Chairperson of Illustration at Parsons School of Design.
Read MoreNessim's artworks have been broadly shown at institutions including The Louvre, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian and The Bard Center, The Victoria & Albert Museum in London mounted a major retrospective in 2013, entitled Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life. Nessim's work is in the permanent collections of major institutions, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Szépmüvészeti Museum (Budapest), The Museum of Modern Art (Lund, Sweden) and The Smithsonian (Washington, DC)
Text courtesy Malin Gallery.
