Claire Lieberman, Two Coats of Paint Artist Residency, Sunday, October 18–Friday, October 23.
Open Studio: Wednesday, October 21, 5–7 pm. Two Coats of Paint, 22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10, Long Island City, NY. For more information or to schedule an individual visit, email staff@twocoatsofpaint.com with STUDIO VISIT in the subject line or contact Claire on Instagram at @clairelieberman
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Our second Resident Artist this month is Claire Lieberman, who joins us from Illinois, where she is a professor at Illinois State University. Lieberman creates playful-looking objects that have rounded shapes and shiny surfaces and conflate childhood toys with instruments of violence, blending ideas about humor and control. Toys, guns, grenades, flowers, sex toys, and fruit have all served as models for her work. Like Claes Oldenburg, who made everyday objects subjects for sculpture, Lieberman treats ordinary things as serious cultural symbols. But while Oldenburg’s humor feels warm and affectionate, Lieberman’s work, hand-carved in black marble, pulses with threats lurking below the surface. Her pulp paintings, lithographs, and linoleum prints employ similar imagery.
Lieberman is one of several artists to use playful forms to explore the deadly human drive towards military conflict. Harun Farocki’s Serious Games, for example, looks at how military training and video games overlap, while Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades retells the Crusades by way of ceramic figurines and antique marionettes, showing how stories of violence are passed down. Lieberman explores such ideas through physical, hands-on sculpture, and black marble is central to her project. Hard and dark, it subverts the joyful color that customarily graces the objects she recreates. The sculptures recall Ai Weiwei’s surveillance cameras, for which he remade contemporary instruments of control in marble, a material traditionally reserved for monuments. But where Ai looks to the institutional, Lieberman is drawn to what is troublingly immediate. As Ann Landi aptly put it in Vasari 25, “Lieberman’s sculpture has walked a fine line between beauty and danger, seduction and destruction” and is “oddly and perhaps tragically suited to our times” in its suggestion that violence is “almost as easy as child’s play.”
In Tirs (Shooting Paintings), in which rifle shots have burst hidden bags of paint, Niki de Saint Phalle too channels aggression into art. And Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works likewise offer viewers art steeped in loss. But Lieberman’s conceptual work is less kinetic or direct, ranging from Ice Guns, a video of toy pistols made of ice incongruously charming in their beauty and playfulness, to GUNPOPS, an event outside 601Artspace on the Lower East Side in which performers from Second City handed out cherry-red, gun-shaped popsicles from a street cart and passersby shared their own stories of gun violence. Lieberman makes guns out of glass, using a fragile material that compromises the status of firearm violence as entertainment. Jack Gardner observed in artcritical that “she derives from Surrealism an appreciation of the dreamlike strangeness of her objects, at once present and familiar yet inscrutably elusive.” Overall, she blurs the lines between art, childhood, and conflict to uneasy effect.
Bio: Claire Lieberman’s recent solo exhibitions include the Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg and Massey Klein Gallery. In May 2026, she completed a residency at the Tamarind Institute. She has received awards and fellowships from the Puffin Foundation; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; the Illinois Arts Council; Yaddo; the American Academy in Rome, as visiting artist; MacDowell; E2C; The Arctic Circle, Svalbard; the National Endowment for the Arts; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille; and Künstlerhaus, Salzburg. She holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA with distinction from Pratt Institute.
Upcoming:
New American Paintings, # 185, book (color. ill.), pulp paintings will be included
The Creative Process, online magazine (color ill.), forthcoming interview
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter, publisher of Two Coats of Paint, and director of the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program.
