Barbara Putnam

Barbara’s prints and quilts invite us to see natural beauty at the brink: the birds, landscapes, and oceans we may soon regard with nostalgia. For two summers in the late ’90s she was the founding artist-in-residence for the Delta Wetlands and Waterfall Foundation in Canada, working in a studio alongside scientists researching avian migration and biology. That experience began a lasting interest in partnering with biologists and botanists in her work, a joint exploration of the natural world joining observation with data collection.

Download Complete CV

Barbara speaks and exhibits her work internationally. Lectures and workshops include universities, printmaking conferences and more recently the World Marine Mammal Conference in Barcelona, Spain in 2019, the European Cetacean Conference (ECS) in Ashdod, Israel in 2022 (virtual), and as co- organizer for a workshop on Communicating science to the general public at the 2023 ECS Conference in O Grove, Spain. Barbara’s work is in public collections that include the Chicago Art Institute, Denver Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Harvard,Yale, and Dartmouth Museums of Art, as well as the art museums in Jyväskylä, Finland, Hanoi,Vietnam, and Douro, Portugal. In 2022 she was awarded the lifetime professional achievement award from Bancroft School.