Barbara E. Mink

Barbara E. Mink ( born September 23, 1953) is an American painter, educator, and founder of the Light in Winter Festival based in Ithaca, New York, USA.

Biography

Mink was born in Buffalo, New York, to Louise and Irving Mink. She has three siblings, Daniel, Robert and Symon. A Summa cum Laude graduate of SUNY Buffalo, she moved to Ithaca, New York in 1976 to pursue a PhD in Comparative Literature. Changing course, she became instead a freelance actor in television and radio commercials, News Director of WHCU radio stations from 1978–1986, and received an MA degree in History from Cornell University in 1986. In 1982 she married Jack Goldman, founder and owner of The Bookery, an independent bookstore in Ithaca. In 1986 her daughter Emily Goldman http://www.esgoldmanillustration.com was born. Since 1986 she has been teaching MBA students in Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, specializing in oral and written communication. She has also been a visiting professor at ESCP-Europe in Paris, working with specialized Masters Students, since 2003.

In 1989 Mink was elected to the Tompkins County Legislature and served for 12 years, five of them as Chair. Deciding not to run for a fourth term in 2002, she founded a festival of Art and Science, the Light in Winter festival (www.lightinwinter.com) and serves as its Artistic Director. She has been an active painter since 1998, starting with large-scale watercolor flowers, moving to still life and landscapes in oil, and for the last five years has worked on large-scale acrylic abstracts. She has studied with Stan Taft, Bill Benson, Bente King and Thomas Buechner.

Mink’s work can be found in collections in Ithaca, New York City, Buffalo, Virginia, North Carolina, California, Alaska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Washington, and Florida.

Educator

Mink has taught Oral and Written Communication to MBA and Executive MBA students at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management since 1986; she has also been a guest lecturer in communication in the Specialized Masters Program at ESCP-Europe in Paris since 2003. In 2004 the Light in Winter Festival of science and art debuted in Ithaca, New York. This annual exploration of collaborations between scientists, artists and musicians was the first festival of its kind in the country, and has served as a model of others that have started in recent years.

Selected Exhibitions

2005 “The Alchemy of Color” State of the Art Gallery, Ithaca NY. “Her best work “Portal” is all about forces of potential energy and dissipating light.  Romantic, stormy skies glinting a greenish tint, seem more  interior than any traditional landscape painter might portray. Her medium size canvases feature glazes of emulsified oil paint, framing a world of contemplation.” Alan Singer, Rochester Institute of Technology.

2007 “Earthworks “Grove Gallery Aurora “In Earthworks Ice III, a tree appears to be in a state of decay. A handful of acrylic leaves have been arranged along the trunk in a way that leads the eye up and off the image, from mid center to the upper left edge. Comprising primarily of dark shades of purple and green, closer examination of the roots reveals an eerie red hue, the presence of which is reinforced through a solid lump of red, which sits on the edge of the canvas at the bottom right corner. The image functions not unlike Marcel Duchamp's Pharmacy (1914), a tree-filled landscape where the artist imposes authorship by the addition of a green and red dot. Similarly, the cadmium could be interpreted as the author's mark within the scope of nature. Or, as it hovers beside the dying tree, it could also be passion in a pure form, simultaneously existing outside of and within the subject, at once autonomous and dependent, by way of a relationship.” Wylie Schwartz, Ithaca Times 2009 “Event Horizons” State of the Art Gallery, Ithaca NY “Her work is quintessentially lush and immediate, seemingly the polar opposite of science's remote concepts. At a recent informal talk (given as part of the LiW-sponsored monthly Science Cabaret series) she expressed some ambivalence about her attempts to bridge these "two cultures". It's best to regard her "concepts" as starting points for personal and unscientific association-making.An unexpected presence unifies most of these paintings. One or several spheres, often red, have been brushed into these amorphous paint-scapes. They invite narrative associations, either microcosmic or macrocosmic — atoms or planets, for example. Too, they could be balls, giving these works a game-like quality. Most importantly, they provide stable reference points for the viewer trying to find a way into these paintings.They're the descendants of the detailed botanical specimens that populated some of her earlier landscapes. For all their geometrical primitiveness, they act as stand-ins for the human body, always moving but stable.” Arthur Whitman, Ithaca Times __________ online: www.barbaramink.com http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/Faculty-And-Research/Profile.aspx?id=bem5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca,_New_York

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