Colleen Plumb

BFA, Visual Communication, 1992, Northern Illinois University; MFA, Photography, Columbia College Chicago, 1999; Coursework in drawing and design, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1988-90.

Exhibitions: Blue Sky Center for the Photographic Arts; 21c Chicago; Union League Club of Chicago; Water Tower City Gallery; Notebaert Nature Museum; Roman Susan; McCormick Gallery; Riverside Art Center; Center for Fine Art Photography; Oolite Arts Miami; National and international guerilla video projection installations. Publications: Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011), critically documents ambivalent dispositions towards animals; Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants, with contributing essays by experts in legal, ethical, and scientific fields. Bibliography: LitHub; Psychology Today; Virginia Quarterly Review; Village Voice; New York Times LENS; Time Lightbox; Oxford American; PDN; Feature Shoot; Orion; Minding Nature/Center for Humans and Nature. Collections: Portland Art Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography; Girls’ Club; Fidelity Collection; Ruttenberg Collection; Southeast Museum of Photography.

I make photographs, videos, and installations investigating contradictory relationships between humans and nonhuman animals in order to increase empathy and unity across species and within our own. My work explores the way animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking and that a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized. I shed light on consumption of the natural world in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice. Through partnering with nonprofit organizations advocating for personhood rights for nonhuman animals, I seek to help shift dialog around what is humane.