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

     
     My work revolves around proposing the body as an archetype of freedom, daring its earthbound nature to creativity, invention, and thought. In drawing I begin by selecting a decisive moment from streaming dance videos, where the performers inspire me by discovering freedom through movement. After describing this stilled moment, I continue to improvise its linear forms into new formal inventions, bringing in other specific social and psychic experiences such as political ideas, jokes, suffering, and theatrical masks. Thus the body engages in a voyage of imagination and invention enacting some of its potential for freedom in the here and now, as did the Situationists 1957-1972 in Europe.
     I committed myself to a life in art in my early twenties and came of age in the 1960s, a time of profound social transformation, roiling with movements for emancipation and justice. I marched for civil rights in Selma, Alabama and participated against the genocide in Vietnam. Today, my sculpture features the dissenting body, which adds to the discourse by joining the corporeal and political, where codes of oppression and power can be revealed, symbolically anchored to concrete reality. It mines this fusion by drawing on the conventions of figures, heads, masks, and bust from the ancient world, folk, and modern art to underline communal values and experimentation with form, avant-garde with social justice.
     One tactic of the dissenting body's vision in sculpture is creating visual pleasure by a neutral palette that brings out subtleties of shape, line, volume, and texture. Another means is the interplay of the opposing qualities of industrially shaped styrofoam packing elements vs. paper laminates, an organic-looking material I developed to create hollow, lightweight, wrinkly forms by layering newspaper with rice paste. I evolved a brush-on finishing plaster to complete it with a firm shell yet tactile softness. The use of diametric qualities challenges the either-or thinking typical of power such as the body vs the mind, to reclaim values such as the inclusive, intuitive, poetic, multiple, and non-dual. My sculptural process enacts freedom by means of improvisation that requires being fully alive in the moment. Then, unexpected forms emerge from the mutuality of self and materials, from collaboration, rather than through dominance and control. The last means of its resistance, besides creativity itself, is to overtly personify an entity or force, such as the wall-mounted bust form, Corporate State.



The following describes some recent images and their range more specifically:

01. Don't Shoot---a terrified figure is rooted to the ground in surrender and despair in the face of gun violence. Its paper-like surface underlines vulnerability, a rigid geometry contrasting with raw, organic limbs. It's both totemic like ancient sculpture and modern in its form of anxiety.
02. Torn by War ---a full figure standing sentinel-like, subjected to violent injury. Its surfaces and shapes hold a turmoil of geometry, the soft and smooth, jagged, and crumpled.
03. Surveillance State—a squarish form, spiked with aggressive eyes and a gaping mouth, capturing the pervasive anxiety of being watched in an era of expanding government surveillance.
04. Techno Man II----a bust form in which human eyes peer out from a mechanical fortress, a figure who has become robotic, absorbing into itself the environment's machinery.
05. Wow---uses the ancient form of mask to register astonishment, rooting it in elemental awe and strangeness, yet modern in its smooth whiteness.
06. Meltdown ----a wall mounted mask, surprised by an inner psychic explosion simultaneously suggesting an ancient archetypal artifact.
07. Death Shrine---a free standing reference to the unconscious forces behind violent behaviors and policies, merging a folk form with modern propaganda advocating wars.
08. Mask of Winter---a wall mounted mask using machined and organic forms, becoming one with a frozen landscape of cold, short days.
09. Celebration---a totemic, ancient-seeming columnar form made solely from thick walls of paper laminates and finishing plaster, reaching upwards in its joy.
10. Bear Sandwich— wall-mounted, merging humor and absurdity by combining the shape of a slice of white bread with a bear’s snout, its rolling eyes on alert.