Top Image: Tara Geer, “Trying to Fly”, 2013, Charcoal, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 47 x 55.25 Inches
Bottom Image: Tara Geer, “Fluent in Darkness”, Date Unknown, Charcoal, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 30 x 40 Inches
Tara Geer was born in Boston, and received from Columbia University both her BA – a double major in Art and Art History, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa – and her MFA, receiving a teaching fellowship as well as the Louis Sudler Prize for excellence in the arts and the Joan Sovern Prize from Columbia’s School of the Arts.
Currently, she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia and in Art and Art Education at Teachers College. Geer also trains teachers and staff in “Visual Thinking Strategies” at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others.
From observation, Tara explores life’s quiet details, the heft of an object, the spaces between close parts, the feel of a thing – externally informed but internally impelled. Her drawings are often large and kinetic charcoal universes, neither bodies nor landscapes but microcosmic resolutions of form and psyche. Sometimes they are exploding webs of cells and scaffolding, thumbprints and scrawl, while other times they are more figurative, familiar, discrete.