Linda Robinson Sokolowski, having begun intense studio work at Rhode Island School of Design, spent her senior year in Rome with the school’s European Honors Program. Those eight months drawing in the Roman Forum, Hadrian’s Villa and the hilltowns of Tuscany initiated an independent vision of landscape sites that are implied records of remarkable human endeavor. After having received her BFA in painting from R.I.S.D. in 1965, she chose the University of Iowa for graduate work in printmaking, after having seen Mauricio Lasansky’s “Nazi Drawings” at the Whitney. Determined to continue her study of intaglio (after Michael Mazur’s “Closed Ward” influences at R.I.S.D.), she chose Lasansky’s superb print workshop where she completed her M.A. with her written thesis, The Original Prints and Restrikes from the Plates of Kaethe Kollwitz.

In 1971, after having been for several years the assistant in Drawing to the painter James Lechay and after having received her M.F.A. in printmaking, she was invited to become Instructor of Drawing at the University of Iowa during the summer months. That same year she accepted a full time Department of Art faculty position at Harpur College, SUNY Binghamton (Binghamton University), later becoming head of printmaking while continuing to be a primary influence in drawing for over three decades. She was known for her glue that connected monotype and intaglio printmaking respectively to painting and sculpture as she enthusiastically designed substantial problems for her students who thrived from those connections.

Sokolowski’s paintings and works on paper have been shown primarily in New York City through Kraushaar Galleries where she presented ten solo shows in the thirty-three years she was represented by that gallery under Antoinette Kraushaar, Carole Pesner and later Katherine Kaplan Degn. In 2007, her landscape retrospective, entitled The Earth’s Stage, was mounted at the Roberson Museum and Science Center in Binghamton. Since that exhibition she has been involved with six series of large monotypes and paintings:
Cathedral Facades; The Coasts of New Zealand; The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak;
Volcanic Fields; The Life of Death Valley, and The Mountains Surrounding Tucson.

Sokolowski received the Childe Hassam Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and several research grants from the State University of New York. She has participated in group exhibitions at many venues including Arkansas Art Center, the Butler Institute of American Art, McNay Art Institute, Munson- Williams-Proctor Institute, the National Academy of Design, Pratt, Rhode Island School of Design and the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution. Her work can be found in the public collections of the Library of Congress, PepsiCo, the Pushkin Museum, Moscow and many universities. Sokolowski’s work has been reproduced in the following publications:
The Artist and the American Landscape by John Driscoll and Arnold Skolnick, published in 1998 in the USA by First Glance Books
Contemporary Woman Artists by Wendy Beckett, published by Phaidon Press Limited, 1988
More than Land or Sky: Art from Appalachia, published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1981
Linda Sokolowski:The Earth's Stage (catalogue for her landscape retrospective), copyright September 2007, Roberson Museum and Science Center ISBN 0-937318-34-5

The artist actively maintains printmaking and painting studios in Bethel, New York where she works and lives with her husband Robert. They travel to sites that her work requires….the Southwest’s canyons, Hawaii’s, Ecuador’s and California’s volcanic craters, Italy’s ruins and structures on water, Germany’s river towns and cathedrals, the temples and pyramids of Guatemala, Mexico and Egypt, and Peru’s Incan structures. Locally she is inspired by a landscape of abandoned spaces, its pools, silos, bridges and its surrounding wetlands and fields. In addition to interpreting the earth’s structures, Sokolowski continues to work figuratively with inspiring models.

lindasokolowski@hvc.rr.com