Temple University

Lisa Yuskavage (BFA '84) is a painter known for her highly original approach to figurative painting that has challenged the genre through its use of bold, eccentric, exhibitionist and introspective characters who are both subject and object. 

“Since her arrival on the art scene some twenty-five years ago, Lisa Yuskavage has made a name for herself with paintings that use classical techniques to depict unabashedly taboo subjects. Her creations—awash in radiant, hallucinatory colors and featuring hedonistic heroines unlike anything else in art today—are instantly identifiable.”
– The Paris Review

During her more than 30-year career, her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions at prominent national and international institutions, like the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; The Baltimore Museum of Art; and The Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (organized as part of Dublin Contemporary 2011). Her paintings appear in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; ICA, Boston; Long Museum, Shanghai; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; among others. 

Yuskavage is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Aspen Award for Art; a Tiffany Foundation Grant; a MacDowell Colony Fellowship; and a Zimtbaum Foundation Fellowship, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts. 

• Portrait of Lisa Yuskavage by Jason Schmidt. Installation image of The Brood at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis courtesy of the artist and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.