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Lincoln Tobier
Senior Lecturer
Teaches In
Fine Arts
Sculpture/New Genres
Bio/Affiliation: 

Lincoln Tobier has been a working artist for over 25 years and has exhibited internationally since the early 1990s. Born and raised in New York City, he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI. (BFA 1986). Tobier moved to Los Angeles in 2000.

Tobier has been a recipient of the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (2007) and the California Community Foundation Award (2013).

Institutional exhibitions include: Institute for Contemporary Art, London (1993); Neue Galerie, Graz (1993); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (1994, 1995); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (1996); Center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (1997); Kunstverein Hamburg, (1998); Ludwig Museum, Aachen (1998); Public Art Fund, New York (1998); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999); Biennale di Venezia (2003); Art Center Wind Tunnel, Pasadena (2004); Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (2007); Centre d’Art Bastille, Grenoble (2008); MOCA, Los Angeles (2008); MAK Center, Los Angeles (2011); Galerie fur Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2011); Royal College of Art, London (2012); Cooper Union, New York (2012); Hessel Museum of Art ar Bard College (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019).

Tobier has been on the faculty at Otis College of Art and Design since 2013.

Public collections: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

The basis of Tobier’s artwork is a critical exploration of the public sphere, the systemic erosion of forms for open exchange and debate, and the structural and legal encroachment on the ethos of democracy. His work examines the power and effects of mass media in both the affirmative sense of its possibilities for cultural production and community building and also its function as a means for financial and political gain by way of emotional manipulation. Tobier sees the goal of this work is to participate in, and add to, the discourse on the relationship between aesthetics, ideology, and mass communication. He has used a range of forms and media including sculpture, painting, photography, video, sound, radio, installations, public projects, and performance. Much of Tobier’s work is project-based, which allows for the development of work in various permutations over the course of years.