Santa Monica, Christopher Grimes Gallery, The Visionary Landscape, 8 January - 19 February, 2000 (another example exhibited); Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, 8 July - 1 October, 2000; San Francisco, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 4 November, 2000 - 28 January, 2001; Aspen, Aspen Art Museum, 16 February - 15 April, 2001; Winston-Salem, Southeaster Center for Contemporary Art, 14 July - 24 September, 2001; New York, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 11 October, 2001 - 17 January, 2002: Tom Friedman; Hartford, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, SNAP! Photography from the Collection, 28 October, 2000 – 30 October, 2001; Lincoln, MA, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Self-Evidence: Identity in Contemporary Art, 7 February – 30 May, 2004; New York, Luhring Augustine Gallery, Portraits of Artists: A Selection of Photographic Works from the collection of Rex Capital, Rhode Island, 7 January - 11 February, 2006 (another example exhibited); New London, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, SUBJECT, 14 May – 14 August, 2006
R. Platt, Tom Friedman, Winston-Salem, 2000, p. 72 (illustrated); The Guggenheim Museum, eds., The Hugo Boss Prize, New York, 2000, p. 57 (illustrated); B. Hainley, D. Cooper, and A. Searle, Tom Friedman, London, 2001, p. 68 (illustrated)
American • 1965
Tom Friedman is a multimedia artist working mainly in sculpture and works-on-paper. Interested in looking at the thin line between fantasy and autobiography, Friedman often creates works that push viewers into a complicit state of witnessing. His sculptures are composed of a multitude of objects, and he assembles them in such a way as to transform the mundane into an intricate work of art. He combines materials such as Styrofoam, foil, paper, clay, wire, hair and fuzz through a labor-intensive practice that seeks to tell a story, whether about himself or the world at large.
Friedman's approach to autobiography is not memoiristic. Rather, he takes the smallest moments of his life, like a piece of paper found on the street, and blows it out of proportion.
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