Raised in Oklahoma, Carrie is a painter, designer, and architect. She designs spaces for the exhibition of art while also researching the structure of cities and maintaining her own studio practice. For many years she was with Selldorf Architects as Associate and Designer. In New York City she worked with arts institutions, commercial galleries, and private collectors. She is currently working from a studio at Konstepidemin in Göteborg, Sweden.
Carrie Bobo's artistic practice has been centered in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and is currently located at Konstepidemin in Göteborg. She holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture and a Master of Fine Arts. Her practice centers on an exploration of home through writing and artistic production: home as place, home as idea, and home as identity. Home as a place is the wellspring from which we learn to see our position in society. Home as an idea is the sense of well-being, belonging, and acceptance that we perennially seek. Home as identity is the home of our national and cultural identification. How does contemporary global society impact our ties to home? How do we work to safeguard our domestic lives? Once separated from our home and homelands by physical or emotional turmoil, how do we reconstruct home as place, idea, or identity? Carrie’s work has been shown in galleries in Chelsea, Williamsburg, and Bushwick, Brooklyn as well as at Sotheby’s in New York City and is included in Soho House’s arts collection.
I was raised in Oklahoma.
An Oklahoma of occasional, irregular hills, invasive cedars, and deep, broad, often dry waterways.
An Oklahoma of sparse suburbanism on a street named for Twelve Oaks.
I attended a farm school where sports was king.
This was home.
I was most happy in the summers, when I could dream of all the far away places in the books I read; places that felt more like home.
I met a woman in Birmingham, Alabama with glasses that I loved. She was an architect.
Betsy, my university chemistry research advisor, had always dreamed of becoming an architect.
I graduated from architecture school in Oklahoma and moved, by way of San Francisco, to New York City, a place with buildings.
I worked in architecture.
I fell in love with the Art Students League; the real melting pot of New York City.
I received an MFA.
I worked in architecture, and made paintings and prints and sculptures and little drawings, to see better, in all the moments between.
I thought about people.
I wondered about façade.
The façade that keeps you at arm length, desiring an embrace;
The façade that boisterously welcomes you in, wanting only solitude;
The façade that merely hints, at what may be, a way inside.
I made paintings about this.
I thought about home.
Homes generate identity / continuity / stability.
Homes, in appearance and location, explain our position in society.
Connecting art and architecture, my work explores cultural conceptions of home and belonging. My paintings and monotypes investigate façade, control, inclusion and exclusion; they are portraits of home.
How do we find home?
