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Beverly Fishman — Former Artist-in-Residence and Head of Painting Department

Beverly Fishman is a Detroit-based artist, formerly the Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Painting Department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art for 26 years. Fishman presents research that stems from an evolving investigation over 20 years on the topics of science, imagery and the advertising of pharmaceutical industries. The artist uses hue and texture along with intense color to cause optical confusion in her viewer, and reliefs from her Big Pharma series leave a hovering glow on the gallery wall. Her work has been included in many thematic exhibitions addressing abstraction, technology, medicine, and the body.

Untitled (Antipsychotic, Sleepiness, Pain) merges the artist’s exploratory process in paper with the sleek finish and sheen of her recognizable reliefs. Fishman's evolving exploration of glossy, pill-shaped reliefs are created to attract immediate attention, mimicking the vigorous and persuasive tactics used by drug companies and their advertising agents. An eagerness to solve all our problems with a prescription points to a global dilemma that resonates on an ethical, social, and emotional level for the artist. It is by transforming the iconography of medicine and translating it into the realm of art that Fishman forces us to consider our own attraction, revulsion, and dependence on Big Pharma.⁠

"In my work, I hope the colors and forms — even if you know nothing about them — evoke a technologically mediated world, one in which our desires are fed by the mass media and our identities are influenced by the products that we consume.” — Beverly Fishman