Work, home, place, politics and the life of inanimate objects compel me to make images, drawings paintings. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I am political activist and artist making a living as a book conservator and graphic designer.
My interest in a more humane world plays a part in what I choose to make my work about. Elevating the ordinary with an occasional bit of humor, much of my body of work has been the celebration of the everyday: the comfort and familiarity, as well as the frustration of it. I also infuse my work with very specific subjective personal-historical meaning that simultaneously functions as universal experience through use of common images that every person can recognize.
My most recent series combines simple images and phrases referring to over-work: the exhaustion, the drudgery, the dedication and surviving the horror of it. The words used in my newest drawings/paintings are quotations that come from a specific time when I was volunteering as a legal assistant for a death penalty case.
In addition to making art, I’ve spent the last 16 years dedicated to supporting various freedom struggles through organizing demonstrations, actions and political events. Using my professional and visual skills, I’ve also contributed solid assistance to a variety of social change campaigns and projects—making posters, signs, large-scale banners, stickers, stamps, and fliers. I have been part of political groups, coalitions and collectives and had 7-year run as the co-host for a women-only life drawing class out of my Logan Square studio.
—Tracy Kostenbader, September 2006