Deb Sokolow is an artist and writer whose semi-fictitious drawings and books speculate both comically and critically on a number of subjects including architecture, politics, organizational structures and the human psyche.
Sokolow’s most recent text-driven, maquette-like drawings visualize ideas in which architecture, design, psychology and social engineering overlap. She envisions scenarios from both an idiosyncratically-designed future and present moment in response to the male-dominated history of architecture described in architecture historian Kenneth Frampton’s 1300-page tome, Modern Architecture, to neurologist Sigmund Freud’s ideas about unconscious desire, to theorist Edward Bernays’ (Freud’s nephew) focus on controlling human behavior for corporate interests and to the descriptions of wellness cults and cultures in linguist Amanda Montell’s book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism. Sokolow’s drawings respond, through a feminist lens, to these sources and focus with humor and criticality on both the spiritual and mental health needs of individuals as well as the potential for social engineering to control built environments (for better or for worse) in an era of increasing climate, economic and social instability.
Sokolow’s writing, in the form of hand-drafted texts, gives content and context to the visuals in each drawing which are semi-abstract and often suggest aerial and elevation views of floorplans, the shapes of objects and other diagrammatic elements. Perpendicular dimensional paper tabs protrude from the surface of each drawing’s surface, suggesting walls and other types of boundaries. Some pairings of texts and visuals intentionally don’t quite match up, or they purposefully match up too well in an over-redundant and ridiculous way. Often, something is revealed in the visuals that is not mentioned in the text, and vice versa.
Deb Sokolow’s work has been included in the 4th Athens Biennale (Greece), the 5th Chicago Architecture Biennial and in exhibitions at Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Siegen, Germany), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Drawing Center (New York), Abrons Art Center (New York), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and a MATRIX exhibition at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford). Her work has been reproduced for Creative Time’s Comics project, the 2017 Best American Comics, in Vitamin D2, a survey on contemporary drawing and in a several-page spread in the fall 2018 issue of BOMB Magazine. Her 2023 solo show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed by Lori Waxman in Hyperallergic, her 2019 solo show at Western Exhibitions was reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail by Elizabeth Buhe and John Yau reviewed her 2016 solo show in Hyperallergic.
Sokolow’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Thomas J Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and is a recipient of an Artadia award and two Illinois Arts Council visual arts fellowships. Sokolow lives and works in Chicago, is on faculty in the department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Western Exhibitions.