• Graduate Program in Visual Arts, Department of Visual Art & Art History

  • Barbara Balfour

  • Professor

Barbara Balfour profile image

E bbalfour@yorku.ca
W Personal Website

EDUCATION

BA (Smith College)
AOCA (Ontario College of Art)
MFA (Concordia University)

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Balfour is a print media and interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited and given lectures across Canada, and in the USA, UK, France, Germany, Spain and China. She has been a member of two artist collectives, the Toronto based Spontaneous Combustion and the Montreal based Venus Fly Trap. In the field of professional printing, she has worked for artists including Leon Golub, Komar and Melamid, and David Rabinowitch. Other activities involve artist residencies, conference papers, critical writing, and curatorial projects, including the two-volume publication and group exhibition at Open Studio entitled À la recherche (in search of practice-based research); the essay “Spectral Apostrophe” in PUBLIC 51: special issue on colour; and Carry-On Santander, a portable exhibition of artists’ books and multiples shown in Santander, Spain.

In addition to working in print installation, artist’s books, and multiples, Balfour has engaged with text-based art practices and print’s relationship to multiplicity. Her art practice began as an inquiry into the representation of women within medical discourse and an examination of the relationship between soma and psyche. Ongoing research involves reproduction, reproducibility, and the representation of the body within abstraction. Her most recent artist’s book is The Inkiest Black, a reflection on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Current research considers representations of mourning and mortality.  Balfour endorses an expanded understanding of print media in the twenty-first century and believes that reports of the death of print have been greatly exaggerated.

Balfour joined the faculty of the Department of Visual Arts in 1999 . She previously taught print media, interdisciplinary studies, and feminist studio/theory courses at Concordia University. At York, she has developed two Critical Issues courses – Repetition, Reproduction, and Reproducibility and Artists’ Writing/Writing Artists. She teaches Lithography, Artists’ Books and Multiples, and Extended Print Practice in the Print Media Area, and has also taught Image and Object in the Drawing Area. From 2014-17, she served as the Graduate Program Director for the MFA/PhD Visual Arts Program. In 2016, she was appointed as Full Professor.

Graduate Program in Visual Arts, Visual Art & Art History

People of AMPD

Assistant Professor

Natasha Bissonauth

Assistant Professor

Archer Pechawis

Assistant Professor

Marissa Largo

Administrative Staff

Dawn Burns

Professor Emerita

Shelley Hornstein

Technical Staff

Joel Wengle

Administrative Staff

Joy Raymond

Administrative Staff

Rose Le Coche

Assistant Professor

Robyn Cumming

Administrative Staff

Patrick Legris

Technical Staff

P. Roch Smith

Technical Staff

Lindsay Page

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Kotama Bouabane

Associate Professor

Tammer El-Sheikh

Assistant Professor

Holly Ward

Professor

Jennifer Fisher

Professor

Michel Daigneault

Associate Professor

Marc Couroux

Professor Emeritus

Jon Baturin

Professor

Barbara Balfour

Associate Professor

David Scott Armstrong

Associate Professor

Dan Adler

Professor Emeritus

Nell Tenhaaf

Contract Faculty

Chris Ironside

Professor Emeritus

Michael Davey

Professor Emeritus

Joyce Zemans

Professor Emeritus

Tim Whiten

Professor Emeritus

Bruce Parsons

Professor Emeritus

Guy P.R. Métraux

Professor Emeritus

Hugh LeRoy

Professor Emeritus

Barbara Dodge

Professor Emeritus

Shirley Ann Brown

Professor Emeritus

Ted Bieler

Professor Emeritus

Carol Zemel

Associate Professor

Kevin Yates

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Brandon Vickerd

Professor

Malcolm Thurlby

Professor Emeritus

Karen Stanworth

Professor

Yvonne Singer

Associate Professor

Judith Schwarz

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Nancy Nicol

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Nina Levitt

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Yam Lau

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Leslie Korrick

Professor

Katherine Knight

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Hong Kal

Professor

Janet Jones

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Anna Hudson

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Brian Grosskurth

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Sarah Parsons