Tom Friedman, BFA 1988

*Leverett, MA*

Tom Friedman is known for transforming mundane consumer products into playful yet meticulously crafted works of art, ranging from sculptures and drawings to prints, installations and multimedia constructions.

Born in St. Louis in 1965, Friedman earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in graphic illustration from Washington University in 1988 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990.

Friedman’s work has been exhibited extensively in major museums throughout the world, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2000 a career retrospective — organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem — traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, among other venues. The following year Phaidon Press released a monograph dedicated to his work.

Recent exhibitions include Tom Friedman: Aluminum Foil at the Lever House Lobby Gallery in New York and Tom Friedman at the Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. In 2006 the Sam Fox School’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum inaugurated its new College of Art Gallery with Pure Invention: Tom Friedman, an exhibition of more than 20 works, drawn largely from St. Louis-area collections, surveying the last decade of his career.