Polly Apfelbaum is an artist living and working in NYC.

In 2018, Polly had solo exhibitions at the Belvedere 21 in Vienna, Austria and Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, UK, which travels to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, in 2019. She has exhibited widely since the 1980s, including one-person exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA at Bepart in Waregem, Belgium, the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, MA, the lumber room in Portland, OR and at the Mumbai Art Room, Mumbai, India. A major mid-career survey of her work opened in 2003 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, PA, and traveled to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, both in 2004. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Pattern and Decoration, Ornament as Promise, Ludwig Forum for Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany , An Irruption of the Rainbow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Wall to Wall at MOCA Cleveland in Cleveland, OH, Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler at the Rose Art Museum, , Three Graces at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY,  Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft and Design, Midcentury and Today at the Museum of Art and Design in New York , AMERICANA: Formalizing Craft at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, FL, Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, amongst many, many others. 

Polly’s work is in numerous permanent collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Dallas Museum of Art; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern of Art, New York; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1987, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1995, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 1998, a Richard Diebenkorn Fellowship in 1999, a Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 1999, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002, and the Rome Prize in 2012.

Brian stopped by Polly’s loft in lower Manhattan where she’s lived and worked for the last 40 years for a talk about early influence, the Pennsylvania Dutch, Philadelphia funk, craft, design, endless drive and so much more.