In 1971, after having been for several years the assistant to the painter James Lechay and after having received her MFA 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, N.Y..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
WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?
Enigmas for the Visual Arts Studio
2021 Linda Robinson Sokolowski
Printed and bound in the USA by Bookmobile, Minneapolis, Minnesota
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.
