Thomas Woodruff is a self-proclaimed “neo-fabulist” artist who always works in series on large, complex imagistic projects.
Hatched from personal experiences, the projects are often apotropaic and elegiac in nature, dealing with issues raised by the AIDS epidemic, aspects of maintaining wellness, and celebrating the outsider in all of us. The imagery is a cross-culturally hybridized, relentlessly figurative, technically tricky, perversely ornate, and more often than not– dark.
Woodruff has had over 20 one person exhibitions, including shows at the Haggerty Museum, Marquette University; the Selby Gallery, Ringling College of Art, Fla.; the Herron School of Art and Design, IUPUI; the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach; University Gallery, Illinois St. University, Normal, Illinois; the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; the Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, Ga; the Huntington Beach Art Center, California; the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; the St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Lous, MO.; and the Queens Museum, NY.
His works have been included in over one hundred group exhibitions internationally. He shows with P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, MIT List Center, The New School, the Honolulu Contemporary Museum, the Greenville County Museum, and the Art Gallery of Western Austalia.
The book, THOMAS WOODRUFF’S FREAK PARADE (Hardy Marks Publications) won a 2007 AIGA award for best design, and Woodruff has contributed award winning illustrations to every major periodical in America, including a memorable back page series “Rock and Roll Still Life” for Rolling Stone in the early 1990’s. He has created book covers for the novels of Ann Tyler, Roberston Davies, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and many others.
While still in his twenties, Woodruff collaborated with avant-garde theater director Rober Wilson on the décor for his opera Edison, and he also designed the décor and costumes for Salome by Richard Strauss for the Hawaiian Opera Theatre in 2002. Woodruff illustrated Jack Handy’s “My Big Thick Novel” for the 2002 season of Saturday Night Live. He briefly worked as a tattoo artist in the late 1980’s, and has promoted this and other “alternative” forms of image making in many of the exhibitions he has curated.
Mr. Woodruff is the Chairman of the Illustration and Cartooning Departments at the School of Visual Arts in New York , where he has taught for 27 years.
Website
http://thomaswoodruff.com
