Gwendolyn Holbrow - Notable Exhibitions, Installations and Awards

Notable Exhibitions, Installations and Awards

Holbrow’s career highlights demonstrate both the restlessness of her vision and her skill at executing her conceptions. She has won a Gold Medal at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s prestigious Annual Flower Show, with The Root-Children, which addressed that year’s show theme, “Deeply Rooted.” She won Best of Show at the Cambridge, MA Art Association’s National Prize Show with Queen Kong, a 7-foot-tall (2.1 m) Barbie contemplating a diminutive, apish Ken in her clutches. And Make Way for Calflings, a piece submitted for a citywide exhibition featuring cow-themed pieces from artists across America, earned $50,000 at an auction for Boston’s Jimmy Fund – by far the highest value fetched by any of that project’s many well-received pieces.

Other memorable pieces and exhibitions have included Keep it Clean, a table fountain featuring a nude Ken and Barbie together in a (working) miniature shower; It Was Here, a bronze and concrete “historical marker” that lures the observer into noting the infinite, overlooked value of the present moment; and River of Grass, a living sculpture at the Chesterwood Estate and Museum in Stockbridge, MA, in which Holbrow transforms a line of tall grass and wildflowers into a stream, waterfall and pool coursing through the estate’s carefully manicured grounds.