Cathey Billian
Cathey Billian is an environmental artist whose works explore relationships between human perception and natural orders. Recent works have been etched photographs on metal, revealing reflected light as the viewer passes through the image. Other etched photographic works include Perennial Light -a solo show at the Arsenal Gallery/ Central Park NYC and Altitude created at the Banff Center/Canadian Rockies. Her passion for music produced, prior to the pandemic, Musicians and Their Instruments- capturing the moment flesh meets the instrument and sound springs forth. Her dimensional projects have often been at the confluence of public art and environmental interpretation. Her research, at the Pratt Institute Sculpture Park, is the Whispering Bench Project, a unique retrofitted , transformed classic Park Bench taking it from symmetry to an asymmetric gesture overhead. It provides a place of transition for the visitor into a world of nature and art surrounding them.
She has created commissions and installations including Future Antiquities at the Whitney Museum Sculpture Court-NYC, Time’s Lie for the Fields Sculpture Park- Art Omi-NY, YIELD for the Madison Museum-Yellowstone National Park, Merging Traffic for Liberty State Park, NJ, High Passage for the Arch at Prospect Park, Brooklyn, (Time as Place) for Acadia National Park, Frozen Moments for the New York Experimental Glass Workshop Gallery, Brooklyn, and Stopped Time for the Sculpture Center, NYC. Other major projects include BiPlanar Arrival , a permanent light and native geology installation for a Phoenix airport, and a pathway, entry and gallery installation for the Contemporary American Theater Festival expressed in sculpture,sound, light, and text.
Her works are in permanent collections including the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Park Service, Norton Simon Inc., the Brooklyn Museum, Chase Manhattan Bank, and the private collection of former Vice-President Al Gore. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, as well as numerous residencies, and awards from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the New Jersey State Arts Council, the National Park Service (six residencies), the New York/NJ Port Authority, the Experimental Glass Workshop, NY, the United States Forest Service (interpretive residency) and four New York State Council on the Arts Project grants. Her MFA, summa cum laude, was earned at Pratt Institute, where she was a full Professor(retired). She established the college accredited program, Wild America, partnering national parks and college arts programs; she taught environmental design studios at Cooper Union and the Masters Program in Exhibition Planning and Design at the University of the Arts.