Mindy Rose Schwartz is a sculptor living in Chicago. She is interested in the way an individual’s experiences with and memories of mass-produced objects can alter their intended meaning or function.  She makes sculptures that attempt to show the morphing effect, use, experience, and emotion can have on our perception of things.

From the essay that critic and art historian Lori Waxman wrote for Schwartz’s 2011 show at Three Walls gallery in Chicago:

“One could consider the deliberate outmodedness of her choice of technique, material and style: the deftly worked papier-mâché, the confounding crystals and holograms, the West German pottery mode “Fat Lava,” and the hippie leftovers of the 1970s generally. The extremes of her modus operandi—stringing all-consuming macramé from double-height ceilings, building credenzas that sprawl and quite literally reach in every direction—edge close to the hysterical.

And then there are the domestic origins of her sculptural creations, the reinvented end tables, wall hangings and small decorative objects based on furnishings with a handmade look and a mass-production price tag……The crunch of second-wave feminism lurks in her elevation of women’s work and the home environment. Appreciation for the naïveté and weirdness of children’s art sparks an unexpectedly modernist note, of the Paul Klee variety. A wryly loving commentary emerges about the excessiveness of middle-class, suburban consumer culture, as well as the relentlessness of its cycles of fashion.”

Schwartz received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana.  She has shown her work at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago; Three Walls Gallery Chicago: New Capital Gallery, Chicago: Joymore Gallery, Chicago; WhiteWalls, Chicago; The Temporary Space, Houston,  Fountain Gallery, Brooklyn, Gallery 400, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Northern Illinois University Gallery, Chicago; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; Spertus Museum, Chicago; Rose Art Museum, Boston; Old Gold Gallery, Chicago and SLAB projects, LA.

She is currently an instructor in the Sculpture Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches art at a Chicago Public School.