Search Results - Porges, Maria

Maria Porges

Maria Porges (born 1954) is an American artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an artist she is known for the prominent use of text in her visual works, which encompass sculpture, works on paper and assemblage and have an epistemological bent. As a critic Porges has written for ''Artforum'', ''Art in America'', ''Sculpture'' and ''SquareCylinder'', among other publications.

Porges is best known for the curiously labeled wax bottle sculptures she created throughout the 1990s and early oughts, together with the tools and weapons fashioned from books that appear throughout her career. The work is considered to be provocative in its method of inquiry and redefinition of artistic syntax. According to critic Sarah S. King of ''Art in America'', "[Porges] invites viewers to focus their attention on the paradoxical relationships between empirical and subjective systems of interpretation through clever juxtapositions of objects, images and words."

Porges's work belongs to the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Oakland Museum of California. She has exhibited at SFMOMA, the deYoung Museum and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, among other venues. Porges lives in Oakland and is a professor at the California College of the Arts. Provided by Wikipedia