Brooklyn-based artist Mia Pearlman gives candid advice on a wide range of topics, from the concretes of corporate project design to the abstracts of maintaining a longterm career trajectory. Pearlman also discusses working in Europe, professional success and motherhood, and much more.
“Ultimately, what all artists have to confront is, your life as an artist is completely different from your career. The career is about ego, the career is about making money, the career is about having opportunities to to show your work. And those are all important things, but it has nothing to do with the quality of your work. And you can’t let your success or lack of success in your career affect the way you feel about your work, because the one thing really has nothing to do with the other. When I go to the studio I don’t think about my career, I think about my work. And I think when people let those two things get conflated, that’s when they start having real problems.”
Mia Pearlman was born, raised, and lives in New York City. She attended The High School of Music & Art before going to Cornell University for her BFA. Her work has been shown at such institutions and galleries as the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York), the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Alabama), Plaatsmaken (Arnhem, Netherlands), the Center for Recent Drawing (London, England), and the Manchester Art Gallery (England). Pearlman’s substantial press includes coverage in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Boston Globe, Elle Décor Italia, Grafik, Machina, Computer Arts, and PBS Thirteen’s SundayArts and NY1. She has been the recipient of an Artist Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2011), the Robert Clark Visual Arts Space Award (2011), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2008), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2008), and an Established Artist Fellowship from UrbanGlass (2009).