Tom Friedman

The work of Tom Friedman captures for many the essence of art at the beginning of a new century: modest in scale imaginative and ecological painstakingly crafted and unheroic. Friedman suggests a new direction in art - post-video post-political/identity issues post-digital media post-ready-mades. He works in a windowless studio (more like a playground-kitchen-laboratory) in rural Masachusetts, relentlessly inventing these startling ephemeral objects out of the stuff in my house -bits of Styrofoam, packing material, bottle tops, pencil shavings, plastic straws, dental floss, spaghetti, toothpicks, bubble gum. Some of his works are too delicate to move, and exist above all in photographs - and in the imagination. This is art which, to quote New York Times critic Roberta Smith again, raises wonderful questions about the making and seeing of art, about paying attention, about how we spend our time, and about the pleasures of small transformations producing sudden beauty. Solo exhibitions of Tom Friedman's works have been held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. A major touring exhibition of his work, Tom Friedman: The Epic in the Everyday, in 2000-2002 is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and Southeastern Centre for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.