Erika Blumenfeld (born 1971) is an American transdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose practice is driven by the wonder of natural phenomena, humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and the intersections between art, science, nature, and culture. Blumenfeld’s artistic inquiries trace and archive the evidence and stories of connection across the cosmos. Blumenfeld is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Smithsonian Fellow, a Creative Capital Awardee and has exhibited her work widely in museums and galleries nationally and internationally since 1994. Since the early 2000s, Blumenfeld has been an artist-in-residence at laboratories, observatories and in extreme environments, collaborating with scientists and research institutions, such as NASA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the South African National Antarctic Program and the McDonald Observatory. Blumenfeld’s art practice is described as non-traditional and research-based, where the artist has explored many fields and disciplines, including astronomy, geology, planetary science, ecology, environmental conservation, and cultural heritage. Blumenfeld’s research and inquiry have resulted in interdisciplinary artworks in multiple mediums, including interactive 3D computer graphics and 3D modeling, digital media, photography, video art, painting, drawing, sculpture, and writing, which the artist views as the artifacts of her artistic process.
Early life, education & early career
Blumenfeld was born in Newark, New Jersey. Although she moved frequently throughout her childhood, she was raised primarily in the Boston/Cambridge area. Blumenfeld’s curiosity for both the arts and the sciences was encouraged with classes in dance, painting, and classical piano as well as her school’s science, rocket, and computer clubs. A defining moment looking at another galaxy through a telescope when she was a child ignited her passion for the cosmos. Blumenfeld began focusing her artistic pursuits more seriously in 1988 while in high school at Northfield Mount Hermon School. At that time she was focused on the nature of light through the medium of photography, a subject she would return to throughout her interdisciplinary career. Discussing Blumenfeld’s longtime obsession with light, scholar Arden Reed, wrote: “’Light’ was the infant Erika Blumenfeld’s first word, as it was literally the last word of Wilhelm von Goethe, another investigator of that phenomenon.” Blumenfeld’s early black and white photographic abstractions of light and form were first published in the New England Journal of Medicine when she was 19 years old as part of their curated photographic supplementation sections. Early process experimentation led the artist to invent a unique photographic process in her early 20s, then a student of photography at Parsons School of Design, while working with large-format photographic plates and what she describes as “improvised” chemistry. Blumenfeld named her process “Lunatype” for its likeness to the daguerreotype and ambrotype processes of the late 1800s. Blumenfeld completed most of her college coursework between 1990-1993, including a year co-attending Parsons Paris and La Sorbonne’s Cours de Langue et de Civilisation Françaises de la Sorbonne in Paris, after which time she left her studies and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico to begin her career as an artist. Blumenfeld’s first solo exhibition in 1994, titled “Into the Looking Glass,” premiered her first Lunatypes, a series of self-portraits exploring film noire and mythology. The first museum acquisition of her work, a Lunatype titled “Shattered Illusions,” was procured by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in 1998 under the auspices of then curator Anne Wilkes Tucker. Blumenfeld later completed her coursework and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2006. She went on to earn a Master of Science (MSc) in Conservation Studies (with Distinction) from University College London in 2014 with a thesis on preserving the natural, cultural, tangible, and intangible significance of the dark night sky and our view of the cosmos.
Work
Light Recordings (1998-2015) Blumenfeld’s series Light Recordings are a series of photo-based and video-based works that are recordings of natural light onto photographic film and digital sensors without the use of a traditional camera or lens. The work documents the pure phenomena of light itself across various atmospheric conditions and astronomical cycles, such as solstices, eclipses, lunar cycles, and the Sun’s daily shifting light through the seasons. The exposures are often installed together in series or a grid format to visually chronicle the recorded light phenomena over time.