Biography

Linda Ekstrom received her M.F.A. degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1996. She has consistently explored in her sculptures and installation spaces issue of memory and identity and a range of problems at the very center of religious traditions in the West, including sacred book which is the anchor of many of her works, and, the ritual dimensions present in art practice. She has also executed a number of memorial spaces which actualize issues around the Holocaust.

Ekstrom’s work has been included in both solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States since 1982. Following the completion of her M.F.A. in 1996, she has had several solo exhibitions at the Frumkin/Duval Gallery in Los Angeles. Her works have been included in exhibitions at Montgomery Museum, Pomona College; Center for the Book, San Francisco; Center for the Book, New York; LIMN Gallery and Quotidian Gallery in San Francisco; and in the international exhibition, “Faith” at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield Connecticut. Most recently her work was featured in “Sacred Texts” at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and “City Dialogues” at Barnsdall Museum, Los Angeles. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and various other publications.

Ekstrom has taught a range of courses in the Art Studio Department and in the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has developed and taught with a colleague a course on Religion and Contemporary Art at UCSB and they are currently working on a book-length manuscript, Saved from Matter: The Religious Cultures of Contemporary Art. Since 1988 Ekstrom has also taught various subjects in art at Santa Barbara City College.

Since 1996 Ekstrom has served as Artist in Residence in the Center for the Study of Religious at UCSB and in 2000 was selected to give a Herman P. and Sophia Taubman lecture in Jewish Studies. Most recently she was a participant in the Notre Dame University Erasmus Institute Faculty Seminar, led by Geoffrey Hartman, Sacred Hermeneutics and Secular Interpretation. From 1998-2001, Ekstrom served on the committee for the Los Angeles Cathedral, Our Lady of the Angels, selecting art for the exterior and interior of the new cathedral designed by Raphael Moneo.

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