Judy Haberl

Judy Haberl works across printmaking, sculpture, photography, and installation, bringing these disciplines together through an interest in objects, cultural history, and the expressive possibilities of light. Her cross-media practice considers photoluminescence, mystery, and the way images can accumulate psychological weight.

Haberl grew up in rural Colorado, where the western landscape and horses made an early and lasting impression. A shy child, she drew horses constantly. At fourteen, she won a middle-school competition to design an eight-foot sculpture of a rearing horse, the school mascot, which was cast in concrete and remained on the school wall for three decades.

She later became a professor of sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Her visual references range widely, including Louise Bourgeois, Ann Hamilton, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laura McPhee, Anselm Kiefer, Edward Hopper, René Magritte, Francisco Goya, and Käthe Kollwitz. What connects these influences is not a single style, but a commitment to atmosphere, material presence, psychological complexity, and the capacity of an image to suggest more than it states directly.

Photography often serves as a generative part of Haberl’s process. She describes taking dozens of photographs as a way to “sketch,” testing an image for a particular quality of light and context before developing it further. She is especially drawn to rear illumination and backlighting, which create a glow within the image and alter the perceived relationship between figure, object, and space.

This attention to illumination extends throughout her practice. Rather than treating photography, sculpture, printmaking, and installation as separate fields, Haberl allows them to inform one another. Objects carry histories and associations, while light can make those histories feel unstable, heightened, or newly visible.

For many years, Haberl has also worked with the persistent presence of global conflict and its circulation through contemporary media. Images from the news and broader visual culture have entered her work not as illustrations of current events, but as material that has become embedded in her psyche. She is currently focused on continuing her Pandemonium images, a body of work shaped by this ongoing atmosphere.

Haberl is also interested in collaborating with writers in order to extend and complicate her visual concerns. Across her practice, she approaches artmaking as a way of bringing materials, images, and histories into conversation, leaving room for ambiguity without losing contact with the world from which the work emerges.