Art News - Critic's Pick Anne Lindberg, by Ann Landi, Art News, February 2011

With the most modest of means, pencil on cotton mat board, Anne Lindberg makes drawing that appear to ripple, shimmer, catch the light, and respond to the viewer's changing position. As wide as ten feet, they call to mind curtains in a soft breeze – as well as a venerable ancestry of Minimalist master, from Sol LeWitt to Richard Serra.

Lindberg's deceptively simple but labor-intensive compositions, made with an architect's parallel bar, are the result of tightly spaces lines that vary in density and darkness. "There are 17 different leads, from very hard to very soft, and each one leaves a different mark and has a slightly different tonality," says the artist. Changes in pressure introduce another variant. "There's a direct relationship between what you see and what my hand did." To make the larger drawings, she uses an architect-designed "table," a 10-foot vertical surface with a huge parallel bar attached, the whole mechanism operated by an electric wench.

After earning her B.F.A. from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Lindberg served as a curatorial assistant in the department of ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "I worked with textiles that had been given to the museum by people who lived in West Africa for most of their lives," she says. "Essentially I was unpacking the fabric and counting threads." She continued studying fiber arts at Cranbrook Academy of Art, but gravitated increasingly to drawing. A year as a slide librarian at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis followed in 1989-90. She then joined the faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, and has made the city her home since, while spending half her time in New York, where her husband, Derek Porter, is director of the graduate lighting design program at Parsons The New School for Design.

Among Lindberg's more ambitious recent projects is a 200-foot double-paned transparent drawing – essentially a work embedded in glass – that wraps around the second floor of el dorado, a design and fabrication firm in Kansas City Crossroads District. For a pair of billboards atop the Missouri Bank's Crossroads Branch the artist photographed the curtains in the interior of her home – not a drawing per se, but evocative of her works on paper. And at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, she created a room-size installation made entirely of crisscrossed threads, essentially a three-dimensional drawing in space. Her more portable works have been shown at Cynthia-Reeves in New York, priced from $2,500 to $24,000. Of her diverse projects, Lindberg says, "I believe in the potential of one action and one material having many voices."

Art News Critic's Pick.pdf