Jill Baroff

Jill Baroff was born in 1954 in Summit, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York. She received a BFA from Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1976, attended the Artist Seminars Program at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1978, and undertook postgraduate studies at Hunter College in New York from 1980 to 1981.

Baroff's practice is grounded in drawing, but it continually tests the intersection of drawing, data, geography, light, and form. Her Tide Drawings begin with empirical records of water levels at specific locations and times, which she translates into grids, concentric circles and linear sequences. Drawn by hand on Japanese gampi, these works trace the cyclical ebb and flow of tides while also registering the disruptions caused by hurricanes, storm surges, and other atypical weather patterns. In other bodies of work, she allows geometry to become more unstable and self-generating, creating forms that fold and reorganise themselves through a balance of chance and order. More recently, she has extended this language into wood reliefs and wall works, translating the logic of earlier drawings into sculptural space.

Her work is held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Städel Museum, Frankfurt; the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; and the Yale University Art Museum, among others. She has received fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.