Art History & Visual Arts

Occidental College

Faculty

  • Linda Besemer

  • Professor
  • B.A., B.F.A., Indiana University
  • M.F.A., Tyler School of Art
  • Phone: 323-259-2595
  • E-mail: lindab@oxy.edu


Linda Besemer has taught painting and drawing at Occidental College since l987 and has taught all levels of studio courses from fundamentals to advanced criticism seminars. She has also taught academic courses in and gender theory in the Women’s Studies Department. She has served as the Chair of both the departments of Art History and Visual Arts and Women’s Studies. In 2005, Professor Besemer was awarded Occidental’s highest faculty honor for professional achievement: The Graham L. Sterling Memorial Award. And in 2006, she was granted an endowed chair and became the James Irvine Professor of the Arts.

Without canvas or traditional support, her painting explores the plasticity and physicality of painting. Spilling from aluminum rods affixed to gallery walls are dried sheets of two-sided patterned acrylic paint. Referencing critical theory, feminism, objecthood, decoration and finish fetish, Besemer’s paintings question the forms and underlying signifying practices of modernism, abstraction and the two-dimensionality of the medium.

Besemer’s paintings have been featured in numerous museums, most notably: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Corcoran Museum of Contemporary Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Albright Knox Museum, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art, SITE Sante Fe, The Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, The Portland Art Museum, and The Palm Beach ICA. She is also exhibiting internationally in England, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Mexico.

Besemer is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, the George and Eliza Howard Foundation Grant in Painting, and the Chuck Close Rome Prize in Painting, from the American Academy in Rome. She is represented by Angles Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.