DVAA Member since 2024
Blaise Tobia
WEBsite: blaisetobia.com
About:
Blaise Tobia is an emeritus professor in Art & Art History at Drexel University, where he taught a wide variety of courses over 32 years. These ranged from photography to digital media to design, contemporary art history, and urban theory (in particular, the city of Rome). He earned a BA in Fine Arts at Brooklyn College (1974) and an MFA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego (1977). He was a documentary photographer in 1978-79 for the CCF CETA Artists Project in NYC, which was the largest federally funded artists employment project since the WPA. He came to Philadelphia in 1985 to begin his work at Drexel. He has been an exhibiting artist for over 50 years and has had numerous solo and group shows in the region, nationally, and in Italy and China. With his wife/partner Virginia Maksymowicz, he coordinates the CETA Arts Legacy Project, which seeks to preserve and promote the history of the project they both worked for almost 50 years, and which they see as a viable model for government support of artists in today's cultural crisis.
Artist Statement:
My primary subject matter as an artist/photographer has always been material culture, ranging from urban landscape to small details of architecture and vernacular expression. I believe that a great deal can be understood about a society via its material cultural expressions - how it understands itself in the world and in history, what it aspires to, how it values its members. But I realize that processes of photographic representation are not neutral and are not self-explanatory, so I've also always had an interest in the way photographs function: how they are "read" by viewers and how they may convey meaning. To this end, I write about photographic "theory" and I seek to structure my works (photographic series and projects) in ways that make my representational strategies and intentions more readily visible.
