Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing
Website: judithbelzer.com
Judith Belzer was born in 1956 in the suburbs of Chicago and divides her time between Berkeley, California — where she has lived since 2003 — and a small farm in rural Connecticut. She received a BA in English, magna cum laude, from Barnard College in 1979, trained at the New York Studio School, and received a Norfolk Fellowship at the Yale School of Art in 1982. She has been a visiting lecturer in the Department of Visual Art and Environmental Studies at Harvard University from 2017 to 2024. She is represented by Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Mills College Art Museum, and the Nevada Museum of Art. She is the recipient of a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Yaddo Artist Residency. She is married to author Michael Pollan.
Belzer works in oil, acrylic gouache, and watercolor to make semi-abstract paintings of invented landscapes in which the natural and built worlds collide. Since moving to the Berkeley hills in 2003 — where her view encompasses the Bay, shipyards, bridges, and refineries against mountain and marsh — her paintings have broadened from intimate woodland studies to panoramic, chaotic compositions of freeways, parking lots, bridges, and refineries jostle against fields and organic forms. Critics have described the work as evoking the quasi-abstract landscapes of Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn while being distinctly more anxious and dystopian: colored like a feverish Impressionist, drawing like a cartographer of environmental unease. Her recent Weather Report series (2025–26) — shards of matter flinging through clouds of color with no ground or horizon — reflects on political and environmental upheaval as a formal and emotional condition.
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