Colleen Plumb

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 1988-90; BFA, Visual Communication, Northern Illinois University, 1992; Graphic Designer, 1992-1999; MFA, Photography, Columbia College Chicago, 1999. Publications: Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011), critically documents our ambivalent dispositions towards animals; Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants. Exhibitions: Blue Sky Center for the Photographic Arts, Portland; Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY; Jen Bekman Gallery, NY; 21c Chicago; Union League Club of Chicago; Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago; Roman Susan, Chicago; McCormick Gallery, Chicago; Riverside Art Center; Water Tower City Gallery; Center for Fine Art Photography, Denver; Oolite Arts, Miami; National and international guerrilla video projection installations. Collections: Portland Art Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography; Girls’ Club Collection; Fidelity Collection; Ruttenberg Collection; Southeast Museum of Photography; Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection; Tweet Big Chicks Collection.

I make photographs, videos, and installations investigating contradictory relationships between humans and nonhuman animals in order to increase empathy and unity across species and within our own. My work explores the way animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking and that a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized. I shed light on consumption of the natural world in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice. Through partnering with nonprofit organizations advocating for nonhuman animals, I seek to help shift dialog around what is humane.