Brenda Zlamany
Brenda Zlamany is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Since 1982 her work has appeared in dozens of solo exhibitions (including, in New York City, at Jonathan O'Hara Gallery, Stux Gallery, Jessica Fredericks Gallery, and E. M. Donahue Gallery, and, in Brussels, at Sabine Wachters Fine Arts) and numerous group shows in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Museums that have exhibited her work include the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Brooklyn Museum; the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; the National Museum, Gdansk, Poland; Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Belgium; and the New-York Historical Society.
Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Flash Art, the New Yorker, The New York Times, The London Times, and elsewhere and is held in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Deutsche Bank, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the World Bank, Yale University, and Rockefeller University. Zlamany has collaborated with authors and editors of the New York Times Magazine on several portrait commissions, including an image of Marian Anderson for an article by Jessye Norman and one of Osama bin Laden for the cover of the September 11, 2005, issue.
She has completed major institutional commissions for Yale, Rockefeller University, and Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, where her portrait of William and Martha Brown became the first depiction of Black Americans to hang in the historic Great Hall Portrait Gallery, and participated in residencies including Yaddo, MacDowell, the American Academy in Rome, and Denali and Glacier National Parks. In 2024, her portrait of philanthropist Ruth Gottesman honored her historic $1 billion gift to Montefiore. Since 2011, her ongoing project The Itinerant Portraitist has produced more than 2,000 portraits and earned recognition for its community-centered and globally engaged approach. Her film "100/100: The Itinerant Portraitist" won Best Documentary Short at the Greenpoint Film Festival.
Grants she has received include a Fulbright Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Artists' Fellowship in painting, Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and Jerome Foundation Fellowship. She received a BA from Wesleyan University.
Artist Statement
For over three decades, portraiture has been my way of exploring the complexities of identity and human connection. I paint to learn who people are—often through a single sitting—and to hold space for individual presence in a rapidly shifting world. My portraits are documents of exchange, built not just from observation but from conversation, trust, and time.
Working primarily in watercolor for my ongoing project The Itinerant Portraitist, I sit face-to-face with subjects from a wide range of communities—some close to home, others in remote or vulnerable landscapes. Watercolor is fast, direct, and transparent. It demands precision and presence, two qualities I rely on to build intimacy in the short time I spend with each person. The resulting images, often paired with photographs and field recordings, are not just likenesses but fragments of a larger, evolving portrait of who we are—culturally, socially, environmentally.
I've painted artists in Brooklyn, Indigenous leaders in Alaska and Taiwan, survivors of climate disaster in California, girls in a UAE orphanage, and elders in a Bronx nursing home. This work has taught me that portraiture can transcend aesthetics—it can be a form of listening, a tool for visibility, and a mode of care.
This same intent guides my larger-scale oil paintings and public commissions for institutions like Yale and Rockefeller University. Here, the challenge becomes how to represent overlooked histories and build collective memory into enduring works for institutional spaces. Whether working intimately with watercolor or monumentally with oil, I use portraiture to center lives too often excluded from the official narrative.
Painting a portrait, stroke by stroke, creates a longed-for connection amid our fast-paced, digital era. My work aims to illuminate the lives, both historical and present, of individuals who have been overlooked in art and undervalued in society. I remain committed to portraiture not as genre, but as a method of attention—celebrating the enduring power of human connection.
At Tusen Takk
During the residency, Brenda will continue the “Climate in America” chapter of her multi-year global project, The Itinerant Portraitist. Zlamany will create 45 watercolor portraits during her residency–a number symbolic of the 45th parallel that runs through northern Michigan. Through live portrait sessions with residents, she explores humanity's relationship with nature at a latitude halfway between the equator and the North Pole, where seasonal changes are most dramatic and climate impacts increasingly visible. In a public presentation of the work, Brenda aims to foster dialogue linking portraiture, nature, and community while raising awareness about crucial issues.
Instagram: @brenda_zlamany
Public Program
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