Dana Barnes
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Dana Barnes’ works can be found in acclaimed modern architectural spaces as well as private
collections throughout the US, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Dubai and India. These include
private residential commissions/installations created for various museum board trustee officers/
co-founders among other art collectors. The studio’s work is regularly exhibited at major art and
design venues around the world, including: The Armory Show, NY; Museum of Art and Design,
NY; Museum of Craft and Design, SF ‘Raw Design’ Show; TEFAF, NY; Salon Art + Design, NY;
FOG Design + Art, SF; Design Miami (Miami, Basel); R & Company’s ‘Woven Forms’ Show-
Palazzo Benzon (Venice Biennale); R & Company’s and Glenn Adamson’s ‘Objects: USA’
Show, NY; Collective Design Fair, NY (featured artist 2013, 2015); Ralph Pucci International
Gallery (solo show 2011; group shows 2012-current); among several other fairs/shows. Barnes
has been featured in multiple media outlets, including: The New York Times; T Magazine Art
Section; Architectural Digest; CULTURED; The Art Newspaper; Artnet News; as well as features
in Rizzoli and Monacelli book publications.
Barnes creates textural and sculptural works, objects, and site-specific architectural
installations that are made solely by hand. Every work embodies her deep fascination with
materiality, process, and experimentation and comes to life in her Lower East Side New York
studio where she devises her own methods and tools to produce the 3-dimensional forms, often
of large-scale sculptural expression. Using innovative wet bonding processes, woolen and
exotic fiber masses are contorted into a myriad of distortions and densities and fused with
contrasting elements to form abstract compositions that elude convention and challenge the
viewer’s preconceived notion of material and context. Barnes’ exploration of the duality of
material manifests in her novel use of fibers melded with concrete, stone, copper, clay,
Enviropoxy, rubber, steel, glass and knotted antique Persian carpets as an infusion substrate.
Whether informed by a material paradox or the gritty sensual beauty of natural forces, The artists’
work aspires to evoke a deep visceral and physical connection.
Barnes studied at Parsons and The New York Studio School on her way to a career designing
for high-end fashion houses in NYC and Europe. During these formative years, she lived and
traveled throughout the Indian subcontinent, Western and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and
Asia cultivating a deep awareness of textile and tactile forms. She founded Dana Barnes Studio
in 2010 and today works from a turn-of-the-century former synagogue with a small team of
artisans to hand make both small and large scale compositions. The organic and textural nature
of Dana and her team’s work is inspired daily by the layers of history evident in the irregular
stone, brick, wood, and steel materiality of the building.
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Works
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Signature Works
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Exhibitions
