Narrative Biography as of January 13, 2023
Linda Stein is a feminist artist, activist, educator and writer. She is the Founding President of the non-profit Have Art: Will Travel! Inc (HAWT) for Courageous Kindness, addressing bullying and diversity. HAWT facilitated the exhibition The Fluidity of Gender: Sculpture by Linda Stein (FoG), which traveled to 30 museums and universities from 2010 to 2022. HAWT currently oversees Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females – Tapestries and Sculpture by Linda Stein (H2F2), which has been traveling since 2015. Click here to see other series, such as: Below the Eyes: Sexuality and Averting the Gaze, which is based on Stein’s diaries since the 1960s; Sexism and Masculinities/Femininities: Exploring, Exploding, Expanding Gender Stereotypes (SMF); Displacement from Home: What to Leave, What to Take (DC4); I Am The Environment.
When exhibitions travel, they are accompanied by lectures, workshops and interactive educational programs developed by a national Curricular Team of scholars in collaboration with Penn State University. H2F2 will have traveled to its tenth destination in 2023. Stein’s art has most recently been acquired by more than 30 museums in the United States, and abroad in the UK, Finland, and in Sweden where she had a retrospective solo exhibition in spring of 2023.
“My goal as an artist,” Stein says, “is to use my art to transform social consciousness and inspire activism for peace, equality and diversity. With my androgynous forms and pop-culture icons, I invite the viewer to seek diversity in unpredictable ways, to ‘try on’ new personal avatars and self-definitions.”
Stein received the NYS Assembly Citation for Outstanding Leadership in 2022, and in 2018, she was honored as one of Women’s eNews’ 21 Leaders for the 21st Century. She received the 2017 NYC Art Teachers Association/UFT Artist of the Year award, and the 2016 Artist of the Year Award from the National Association of Women Artists.
Stein’s art archives are at Smith College and the Linda Stein Art Education Collection is at Penn State University (PSU). In 2020 PSU received an endowment in perpetuity, for an annual Linda Stein Upstander Award (with yearly awards starting at $1500) for artists and writers using Stein’s archives to inspire the Bully, Bullied, or Bystander to become a Brave Upstander for justice.
In 2016, Linda Stein edited an 84-page, full-color book, Holocaust Heroes: Fierce Females, published by Old City Publishing, including a foreword by Gloria Steinem and essays by notable international scholars and intimates of her ten selected Heroes. That same year, in another anthology, Stein’s 9500-word autobiographical essay, cover design and multi-series art images served as a bridge between two poets for Laura Hinton’s 2016 Jayne Cortez, Adrienne Rich, and the Feminist Superhero. In addition, there have been numerous published reviews and essays about Stein’s work, written by the artist and others, as well as television and radio appearances.
Linda Stein has also been awarded grants and residencies from Squire Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Djerassi Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Hunter College, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Suffolk BOCES Arts and Humanities, and the America the Beautiful Fund. She has been awarded large-scale outdoor commissions at Portland State University in Colorado and East Hampton Airport in New York, has had work donated by Gloria Steinem to Smith College and Rutgers University, was invited to participate in the 2008 Adelphi University Outdoor Sculptural Biennial, and is in numerous museum and private collections.
Stein received her Master’s Degree from Pratt Institute, Bachelor’s Degree from Queens College (graduating cum laude with departmental honors), and attended the Art Students League, Pratt Graphics Center and the School of Visual Arts, all in New York. Linda Stein has been represented by Flomenhaft Gallery in Chelsea, New York from 2005 until 2017 and Longstreth Goldberg in Naples, Florida from 2005 to 2012. She has written for Huffington Post and other publications. She currently lives and works in Manhattan, East Hampton and Cambridge, MA.