Artist Statement
My paintings grow out of an intuitive process of layering—adding, subtracting, and responding to marks as they emerge. Drawn to pattern and rhythm, I begin without a fixed image in mind, allowing line, color, and gesture to accumulate in a kind of visual improvisation. Marks, looping forms, and shifting fields of color create a visual pulse that moves across the surface. As the painting develops, the process becomes more analytical as I decide what to emphasize, soften, or erase, allowing the painting to find its own balance—sometimes dense and turbulent, sometimes spare and meditative. The paintings explore what emerges when structure and spontaneity meet. My hope is to create complex spatial and emotional experiences that invite viewers to look and imagine at the same time.
Biography
Carol Bivins is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work can be found in private collections in the U.S. and in the United Kingdom. Growing up in a small midwestern town, she moved to New York and began pursuing her artistic career. After spending many years in NYC and Los Angeles and working in theater, television and appearing in such films as “Defending Your Life” and “Groundhog Day,” she moved to the Southwest. Seeking a creative outlet, Carol turned to an old hobby, ceramics. Dissatisfaction with glazing results propelled her to investigate drawing and painting. After working on her own for over a year, she took her first painting workshop at the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque. Finding that experience exciting and rewarding, she followed it by enrolling in fine art classes at the University of New Mexico.
Looking for new energy, adventure and inspiration, she relocated to Colorado in 2017. Since then, Carol’s artwork has been juried into exhibitions from coast to coast and appeared in Artsy Magazine as part of the Minimalism exhibition at Shockboxx Gallery in CA and was included in the Los Angeles exhibition “photoLA 2020,” a collection of portraits of LA Artists and Others by fine art photographer, Jeffrey Sklan. In 2021 she was featured in VoyageLA, an online arts and culture publication in Los Angeles. In 2025, she was awarded an “Honorable Mention” in the I Love New York exhibition hosted by Agora Gallery in NYC and most recently, she exhibited her work in the 63rd Annual Juried Competition at the Masur Museum in Monroe, LA, where she received an Honorable Mention.
Always influenced by the environment around her, painting provides her as a means of wrestling with and expressing her emotional reactions to the world at large. Her process-driven, intuitively developed abstract works investigate both the play and the tension created by marks, gesture, line and color as they compete for pride of place on the canvas.
Curriculum Vitae
EDUCATION
Master of Arts, Art Education, City College of New York (CUNY), New York, NY
MFA Studies, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Bachelor of Arts, Studio Art, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA
SOLO EXHIBTION
2013, Into the Shadows, New Century Artists, New York, NY
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2026 – Herstory, Viridian Artists, New York, NY
2025 – Herstory, Viridian Artists, New York, NY
2024 – Herstory, Viridian Artists, New York, NY
2024 – A Bronx Writer’s History, Bronx County Historical Society, Bronx, NY
2023 – Herstory, Viridian Artists, New York, NY
2019 – Psychedelic Moods, Living Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2012 – No Wrong Answers, City College Art Gallery, New York, NY
2011 – Group Exhibition, New Century Artists, New York, NY
2010 – Group Exhibition, Viridian Artists, New York, NY
SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS
The Art of the Cigar, Benzel Busch Mercedes, Bergen County, NJ
The Art of the Cigar, Beekman Bar & Books, New York, NY
COLLECTIONS
Condé Nast Publishing
Meredith Publishing
Mount Holyoke College
Private Collections
PRESS
Crain’s New York Business
NBC
New York Daily News
New York Observer
The Cigar Handbook
TEACHING
2013–Present, Visual Arts Teacher, High School for Contemporary Arts, Bronx, NY
Instructor, Academy of Art University, Online Division
PUBLICATION
Fidoten, Elizabeth. Observe and Envision: Critical Thinking Skills that STEM Needs and Art Education Builds, 2013.