Linda Ford is an interdisciplinary artist whose performance, video, installation, drawing and sculpture, work out a preoccupation with the body’s physicality, traumatic inheritance and positioning as powerless. Early experiences of visiting the "Worcester State Mental Hospital", where her father worked as an orderly, precipitated her lifetime fascination with bodies that transgress. Her past research and work has been informed by her employment in mental health and domestic violence shelters, as well as the sex industry. Ford’s recent projects take up the earth as a body that has been silenced, controlled and violated and whose continued ravaging will further perpetuate the cycle of trauma, upon the most vulnerable of its inhabitants.
Ford earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including El Museo del Barrio Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Saarlandisches Kunstlerhaus, Saarbrucken, Germany; Costa Rican Museum of Contemporary Art & Design, San Jose, Costa Rica; Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach, Miami, FL; Sarah Doyle Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI; Art In General, New York, NY; Samson Projects, Boston, MA; Takt Kunstprojekttraum, Berlin, Germany; Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA
She has been awarded numerous residencies and honors including the prestigious Showhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Headlands Center for the Arts Close Calls, the Studios at MASS MoCA Residency, the Master Workshop in Art Fellowship at Long Island University, Southampton, NY, and The Richard and Marianne Martin Award for the Arts, Boston, MA.
Ford was born and raised in Worcester, MA, lived in San Francisco for 25 years, and currently resides in Providence, RI.
