Catherine Fairbanks

For the last ten years or so, Catherine Fairbanks's work has centered on the idea of empathy and it’s appearance as a foundational structure in living processes. Empathy is the bridge between her practice as an artist, and her day job-practice as an (Covid) ICU nurse in an urban medical center. In both roles, she is in dialogue with the early 20th century phenomenologist, Edith Stein. For Stein, empathy was the liberating recognition of infinite difference in the other, to whom we never arrive. Yet with whom, in Fairbanks's words, we always remain cohered, abundant and present. This is not empathy as feeling, this is empathy enacted socially as equality and liberation.

Fairbanks received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and has since attended national and international residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the National Textile Institute in Iceland, where in 2014 she produced her solo exhibition Empathomimesis, and the Wool Factory in Barcelona in 2017.

A recent important and ground-shifting work for Fairbanks was the premier of Chimney Dances, a four-site collaborative work with Dylan Crossman, formerly of Merce Cunningham Dance Company, at the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA, and Pieter Space, in February of 2020. She has received critical acclaim and publication in Artforum, der Freitag, Carla, SFMOMA openspace, Thick Press, and Artillery.