Linda Robinson Sokolowski, having begun intense studio work at Rhode Island School of Design, spent her senior year in Rome with the school’s European Honors Program. Those eight months drawing in the Roman Forum, Hadrian’s Villa and the hilltowns of Tuscany initiated an independent vision of landscape sites that are implied records of remarkable human endeavor. After having received her BFA in painting from R.I.S.D. in 1965, she chose the University of Iowa for graduate work in printmaking, after having seen Mauricio Lasansky’s “Nazi Drawings” at the Whitney. Determined to continue her study of intaglio (after Michael Mazur’s “Closed Ward” influences at R.I.S.D.), she chose Lasansky’s superb print workshop where she completed her M.A. with her written thesis, The Original Prints and Restrikes from the Plates of Kaethe Kollwitz.
In 1971, after having been for several years the assistant in Drawing to the painter James Lechay and after having received her M.F.A. in printmaking, she was invited to become Instructor of Drawing at the University of Iowa during the summer months. That same year she accepted a full time Department of Art faculty position at Harpur College, SUNY Binghamton (Binghamton University), later becoming head of printmaking while continuing to be a primary influence in drawing for over three decades. She was known for her glue that connected monotype and intaglio printmaking respectively to painting and sculpture as she enthusiastically designed substantial problems for her students who thrived from those connections.
Sokolowski’s paintings and works on
paper have been shown primarily in New York City through Kraushaar
Galleries where she presented ten solo shows in the thirty-three
years she was represented by that gallery under Antoinette Kraushaar,
Carole Pesner and later Katherine Kaplan Degn. In 2007, her landscape
retrospective, entitled The Earth’s
Stage, was mounted at the Roberson Museum and Science Center
in Binghamton. Since that exhibition she has been involved with
six series of large monotypes and paintings:
Cathedral
Facades; The Coasts of New Zealand; The Great Hypostyle Hall at
Karnak;
Volcanic Fields; The
Life of Death Valley, and The Mountains Surrounding Tucson.
Sokolowski received
the Childe Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters and several research grants from the State University
of New York. She has participated in group exhibitions at many
venues including Arkansas Art Center, the Butler Institute of
American Art, McNay Art Institute, Munson- Williams-Proctor Institute,
the National Academy of Design, Pratt, Rhode Island School of
Design and the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian
Institution. Her work can be found in the public collections of
the Library of Congress, PepsiCo, the Pushkin Museum, Moscow and
many universities. Sokolowski’s work has been reproduced
in the following publications:
The
Artist and the American Landscape by
John Driscoll and Arnold Skolnick, published in 1998 in the USA
by First Glance Books
Contemporary
Women Artists by Wendy Beckett, published
by Phaidon Press Limited, 1988
More
than Land or Sky: Art from Appalachia, published
by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1981
Linda
Sokolowski:The Earth's Stage (catalogue
for her landscape retrospective), copyright September 2007, Roberson
Museum and Science
Center ISBN 0-937318-34-5
The artist actively maintains printmaking
and painting studios in Bethel, New York where she works and lives
with her husband Robert. They travel to sites that her work requires….the
Southwest’s canyons, Hawaii’s, Ecuador’s and
California’s volcanic craters, Italy’s ruins and structures
on water, Germany’s river towns and cathedrals, the temples
and pyramids of Guatemala, Mexico and Egypt, and Peru’s
Incan structures. Locally she is inspired by a landscape of abandoned
spaces, its pools, silos, bridges and its surrounding wetlands
and fields. In addition to interpreting the earth’s structures,
Sokolowski continues to work figuratively with inspiring models.