Carol Bruns (b. 1943, Des Moines, Iowa) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, focusing on sculpture and drawing. She earned a degree in Fine Arts from NYU in 1966, subsequently studying at the Art Students League in New York City, and l'Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Bruns began exhibiting her work in 1975 at OK Harris Gallery, where she presented wall pieces crafted from found materials, cloth, and thin layers of colored plaster.
      In 1980, she was a guest artist at the Caraccio Etching Studio, and her prints were later published by Orion Editions. In 2002, she received a printmaking fellowship from the Women's Studio Workshop. Between 2000 and 2006, she participated in four two-person exhibitions at the Tew Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, while continuing to exhibit in group shows and engage in community and curatorial projects. Notable efforts include organizing Dumbo Open Studios, curating Persona: A New Look at Portraits (1997) and Festival of Political Pleasure (2017), publishing artists' books (Pages, with Robert Jacks), and creating stage décor for the Bellerophon Dance Company.
Bruns was featured in a 2013 interview by Gorky's Granddaughter.
       Her recent exhibitions include The Parlour Bushwick (2015), Sculpture Space in Long Island City, SRO Gallery in Brooklyn (2017–18), and Zurcher Gallery (2021 and 2023). She also held a solo exhibition at White Columns in 2023. In 2024, she published A View, a 100-page book of drawings and photographs.
       Bruns has received numerous grants and residencies, including:

• 2025: Monson Residency
• 2024: MyMA Grant and VCCA Residency, Amherst, Virginia
• 2023: Saltonstall Residency, Ithaca, New York
• 2019: Tree of Life Grant
• 2018: Artists' Fellowship Grant

STATEMENT
 
     Making art is a way of living, of knowing myself and the world, from inside its integrative process. I use the body as a concept, an inner and public subject, and a vision, to critique our culture and picture a better world. Presenting the figure in various historical formats (full figure, bust, heads; drawing, sculpture) is an act of freedom in the face of life's suffering and political oppression. Its symbolic significance echoes many indigenous cultures going back to the earliest times of art, and affirms their relevance to a life/nature balance so relevant to the current era, cultures who lived in a matrix of interconnection, mutuality, sacred cycles, hospitality, and the gift. Its conceptual markers are a vision body for these values and the dissenting body against injustice, war and exploitation.
     The following primary experiences have shaped my viewpoint: living as a female; coming of age in the tumultuous 1960s; ongoing reading and self-educating across a wide range of interests; practicing yoga and meditation with the followers and teachings of Muktananda; living for a year each in Paris, France and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; working as an artist outside the gallery system with a day job and without institutional support for fifty years; and eighteen months living in a homeless shelter 2019-21 during Covid, in addition to raising a daughter. I am now 81 years old.
My first serious art making was at NYU studying with such artists as Milton Resnick and Robert Kaupelis who directed my attention to abstract expressionist painting and experimental and observational approaches toward drawing the figure. My education confirmed that we can live utilizing both a body and a mind, that we can value the analytic/rational as well as the holistic, inclusive, intuitive, emotional, and poetic.
     Two examples of some recent sculptures are a group called Fringe Elements, consisting of highly individuated masks mounted on a standard, representing the Other---the dumped and discarded, outsiders, and scapegoats who serves as social objects of aggression or exclusion. The sculptures' aesthetics invite the viewer to draw near and cohabit their space with empathy, to see the monsters as ourselves, and even enter a place of transfiguration. Another work Corporate State made from cardboard, paper, plaster, bitumen, using the politically commemorative bust-form, hangs on the wall. It represents the corporate legal person, a current dominating political power, as a shadowy, bulging and belching volume projecting into space colored by its signature material, petroleum.