Carol Bruns (b. 1943, Des Moines, Iowa) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, focusing on sculpture and drawing. She earned a degree in Fine Arts from NYU in 1966, subsequently studying at the Art Students League in New York City and l'Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Bruns began exhibiting her work in 1975 at OK Harris Gallery, where she presented wall pieces crafted from found materials, cloth, and thin layers of colored plaster.
      In 1980, she was a guest artist at the Caraccio Etching Studio, and her prints were later published by Orion Editions. In 2002, she received a printmaking fellowship from the Women's Studio Workshop. Between 2000 and 2006, she participated in four two-person exhibitions at the Tew Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, while continuing to exhibit in group shows and engage in community and curatorial projects. Notable efforts include organizing Dumbo Open Studios, curating Persona: A New Look at Portraits (1997) and Festival of Political Pleasure (2017), publishing artists' books (Pages, with Robert Jacks), and creating stage décor for the Bellerophon Dance Company.
Bruns was featured in a 2013 interview by Gorky's Granddaughter.
       Her recent exhibitions include The Parlour Bushwick (2015), Sculpture Space in Long Island City, SRO Gallery in Brooklyn (2017–18), and Zurcher Gallery (2021 and 2023). She also held a solo exhibition at White Columns in 2023. In 2024, she published A View, a 100-page book of drawings and photographs.
       Bruns has received numerous grants and residencies, including:

• 2025: Monson Residency
• 2024: MyMA Grant and VCCA Residency, Amherst, Virginia
• 2023: Saltonstall Residency, Ithaca, New York
• 2019: Tree of Life Grant
• 2018: Artists' Fellowship Grant

STATEMENT

  


         I work in sculpture and drawing, using an eclectic range of forms such as the ancient folk mask, indigenous totem, the modern figure, and portrait heads. These figure-forms are metaphors for ideas about ourselves in the collective, and for individual human complexity. They view political life through a noir lens, delve into deep psyche, and uncover humor, with relevance ranging from the topical to the archetypal. Now an eighty-one year old, my experiences of a long art life have incongruously resulted in an indie-cool aesthetic.
         In the last twenty years of sculpture making, its language has used styrofoam packing materials with their industrial mechanical shapes as well as a direct opposite--- paper laminates, a material I invented to feature hollow, organically wrinkled forms, made by layering newspaper with rice paste. I evolved a brush-on finishing plaster to complete it with a firm shell. These invented and found materials are complemented by the flatness of cardboard, poured Hydrocal plaster, bamboo stalks, stretchy knit cloth, and paint resulting in an assemblage of feelings and textures in human-body size. They are left the white of the materials, or a single tone of gray or black. Its aesthetic is tactile, unique, contradictory, and unexpected.
         My process of art is improvisation, a form of experience where time can return to an organic flow, with variable qualities, in contrast to mechanical and intellectualized time channeled by clocks, ideas, programs, and schedules. Improvisation is political as well as aesthetic, cooperating with its object world instead of seeking to control and dominate it, implying mutuality between myself and the materials. It also symbolizes the values of risk-taking, confronting the unknown, the ineffable, local, poetic, subjective, and eccentric which emphasize the human as multidimensional, a strange, destructive, and wondrous creature composed of mind, body, emotion, and spirit.