ABOUT the artist
Linda Cunningham is a New York City based artist who exhibits extensively both in New York and Germany, with recent solo exhibitions/ installations at BronxArtSpace, Governors Island, 2025; Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn, 2023; ODETTA Gallery, Bushwick, Brooklyn & NYC, 2019/20 2017 & 2015; the Bronx Museum 2016/17, 2014 and 2010, and The American Univ. Paris, 2017, also 2 & 3 person exhibitions at BronxArtSpace and Bronx River Art Center, 2023.
She has exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions at the Fundacion Euroidiomas, Lima, Peru, Statt Museum, Cologne Germany, as well as at the Kassel and Bad Hersfeld Rathauses, Germany, and group exhibitions America House, Berlin, and Amsterdam.
A series of Cunningham’s collage/drawings were acquired by the Pinto Museum, Antipolo, Philippines in 2024.
Cunningham’s monumental public sculptural installations and alternative memorials are in public collections in Cologne, Kassel, Bad Hersfeld, and Cornberg, Germany; in the USA, Griffiss International Sculpture Garden, Rome, NY, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, N.J. and Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pa.
Temporary public sculpture installations were formerly sited at UN Plaza, NYC, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, & CUNY Graduate Center on 42nd St across from Bryant Park, and in Tribecca, NYC.
The city of Kassel Germany commissioned a 6 panel public sculpture installation, 2020/21 commemorating “11 Frauen,” Project Renewal Inc, commissioned decorative fences in two different sites, 2013 & 2015.
Her exhibition record includes 52 One Person exhibitions and 75+ group exhibitions in the USA and internationally.
She has a MFA from Syracuse, Univ., and a BFA from Ohio Wesleyan Univ.
She received numerous grants from the Bronx Council on the Arts, most recently in 2025, a Fulbright Senior Research fellowship, Berlin, the Arts International Kade Collaborative Works, the Pa. Council on the Arts, and the John Anson Kittredge Foundation and served as the Arthur and Katherine Chair of Humanities, Franklin and Marshall College, now emerita.
Layers of torn edges and severed forms distinguish Linda Cunningham’s large format drawing/ constructions. The tactile sensibility of her work comes from her interest in the qualities of materials, observed or found. She transforms found materials, a kind of “Urban Mining,” and preserves the qualities of found materials with the material history inscribed in their surface. In the wall-constructions she fuses relief elements, such as exposed structural fragments or sand-cast bronze, shaped by the physical process of the pour. Even the bronze forms she casts from military surplus scrap.
Cunningham’s work is concerned with time, transience and contradictions, and she gravitates to architectural and structural remnants of current and previously existing cultures. She often poses the veracity of the photo-based transferred images against interpretive, fluid calligraphic drawing line and form. With sensually gripping form she tempts the viewer to take in sometimes discomforting, underlying content. Discarded materials such as twisted steel beams & unraveling copper cable from the former German border become metaphors for the transience of 21st C development.
“Neither site nor material have shed their past, but here they emerge triumphant, bearing their industrial scars and creating a new, decidedly-urban, aesthetic”…“History is embedded in their composition, giving depth of meaning to the spiraling, rising arcs which emerge”….. The biomorphic forms of Cunningham’s sculptures recall both a long-forgotten natural past and the very concrete nature of obliterated man-made structures.”
Sarah Archino
Sculpture Magazine, July/August 2011