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
 
     
Concept.
The body in my art represents the human subject in the world. Grounded in the tangibility of a sculpted form, it seeks to understand what's hidden inside us, while simultaneously presenting the subject in its political landscape. Set in a context of world art, it challenges received ideas about history, art history, taste, and the female. Its symbolic significance echoes many indigenous cultures back to the earliest times of art and affirms their relevance to a life/nature balance so relevant to the current era, evoking those who lived a matrix of interconnection, sacred cycles, hospitality, and the gift.
The work adopts a range of historical conventions--- full figures, heads, masks, and busts ranging from the ancient world, folk art, to modern times. Implicit is a rejection of linear histories with their ideological, colonial biases. It freely experiments with forms and materials aligning with the Moderns, and also has a strong connection to the European Situationists 1957-1972. Some contemporary inspirations are Thomas Hirschorn, Leon Golub, Ana Mendieta, Beverly Buchanan, Phillip Guston, Louise Bourgeois, Jacqueline deJong (herself a Situationist), Kader Attia, Alice Neel, James Kerry Marshall---artists who embody highly individuated, aesthetically original visions of contemporary life.

Drawing.
In drawing I often begin by selecting a decisive moment from streaming dance videos, where the performers inspire me, exercising their freedom by means of creative movement. After describing stilled moments, I continue to improvise with formal inventions, merging the figure with other contents such as political ideas, jokes, suffering, the irrational, experiential, ambiguous, emotional and theatrical. I also draw from the shocking videos of fentanyl addicts living on the streets. The drawn body engages in a voyage of imagination, spiritual and psychological discovery, committed to human solidarity, discovering some of its potentials for thought and feeling.

Background.
I chose a life in art in my early twenties, coming of age in the 1960s, a time of profound social transformation, thundering with movements for emancipation and justice against the previous McCarthy era's repression. I marched for civil rights in Selma, Alabama and participated against the genocide in Vietnam. Today, my sculpture features the dissenting body, which adds to the discourse by joining the corporeal, psyche, and political, where codes of oppression and power can be symbolically revealed, anchored to concrete, visual reality. As culture we are regressing instead of progressing, moving from crisis to catastrophe. I look at pre-history, outsiders, the archaic, the indigenous for aesthetic and cultural values, a model of living in balance with what remains of the natural world by means of the vision body. The radical tradition is remade in my work.

Vision.
I make art as an Other, a female in a patriarchal world still regarded in the best of lights with ambivalence. In this world of massive brutality, exploitation, and sexual oppression, the aesthetic art work might seem a slight response, yet such cultural acts are part of the complexity of resistance, with cumulative events and unknowable outcomes. It's a defiant act of freedom.
One tactic of the dissenting body in sculpture is visual pleasure, evoking mythic Eros (desire) by means of a neutral palette that brings out subtleties of shape, line, volume, and texture. Aesthetics can transport a viewer beyond everyday life to savor another realm, temporarily an end in itself, suspended from practical worlds. Back to planet earth, the viewer potentially returns inspired with new thoughts and feeling from such absorbing experiential excursions.
Another means of its visual engagement is the meaning of the opposing qualities between plastic vs wood-derived paper and plant-derived paste. For this I use found styrofoam packing elements and paper laminates, a material I developed to create hollow, lightweight, wrinkly forms by layering newspaper with rice paste. I evolved a brush-on finishing plaster to complete it with a firm shell yet tactile softness. The use of such diametric qualities represents the discovery by Einstein that our world is both the binaries, not either/or. The implications of this fact are that we have a choice, both personally and politically. We can live as both a body and a mind; value the analytic/rational and the holistic, inclusive, intuitive, and poetic.
Additionally, my sculptural process enacts the value of freedom by means of improvisation that requires being fully alive in the moment, dwelling with the unknown. Then, unexpected forms emerge from the reciprocity of self and materials, from collaboration rather than through dominance and control. The last means of its political critique, besides creativity itself, is to overtly personify an entity or force, such as the wall-mounted bust form, Corporate State. Its political vision values trust, solidarity, cooperation, dialogue, and community.
On the psychological level, the suffering subjects portrayed in this art are scapegoats at the center of the communal social tragedy we live within. Monstrous and deformed, they can be recognized as ourselves by the contradictions of aesthetics.

The following describes some recent sculptures and their range more specifically:

01. Don't Shoot---a terrified figure is rooted to the ground in surrender and despair in the face of gun violence. Its paper-like surface underlines vulnerability, a rigid geometry contrasting with raw, organic limbs. It's both totemic like ancient sculpture and modern in its form of anxiety.
02. Ruins of War ---a full figure standing sentinel-like, subjected to violent injury. Its surfaces and shapes hold a turmoil of geometry, the soft and smooth, jagged, and crumpled.
03. Surveillance State—a squarish wall-mounted head, spiked with aggressive eyes and a gaping mouth, capturing the pervasive anxiety of being watched in an era of expanding government surveillance and Tech data gathering.
04. Techno Man II----a bust form in which human eyes peer out from a mechanical fortress, a figure who has become robotic, absorbing into itself the environment's machinery.
05. Wow---uses the ancient form of mask to register astonishment, rooting it in elemental awe and strangeness, yet modern in its smooth whiteness.
06. Meltdown ----a wall mounted mask, surprised by an inner psychic explosion, simultaneously suggesting an ancient archetypal artifact.
07. Death Shrine---is a free standing reference to the unconscious forces behind violent behaviors and policies, merging a folk form with modern propaganda advocating war.
08. Mask of Winter---a wall mounted mask using machined and organic forms, becoming one in winter, a frozen landscape of cold, short days.
09. Celebration---a totemic, ancient-seeming columnar form made solely from thick walls of paper laminates and finishing plaster, extending itself upwards.
10. Bear Sandwich— wall-mounted, merging humor and absurdity by combining the shape of a slice of white bread with a bear’s snout, its rolling eyes on alert.
11. Fringe Elements---a group of highly individuated masks mounted on a standard, representing the Other---the dumped and discarded, outsiders, scapegoats who serve as objects of aggression or exclusion. The sculptures invite the viewer to draw near and inhabit their space with empathy, to see the monsters as ourselves, to enter a place of transfiguration.
12. Corporate State---cardboard, paper, plaster, bitumen----the politically commemorative bust-form, hanging on the wall, representing the corporate "person", a current dominating power, shadowy, bulging and belching its volumes into space, colored by its signature material, petroleum.
13. Man of the Gift. A seemingly primitive standing figure, incorporating both organic and contemporary geometric forms who embodies the ancient social idea of gifting, in which one participates in something greater than oneself. The self is expanded to include something of the other.