Today we’d like to introduce you to Tama Hochbaum.
Hi Tama, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I am an artist; I have been since I was 19. It has been the armature of my life.
I grew up in New York, in a religious Jewish household.
I discovered myself as an artist in college. I had gone to Brandeis University thinking I would be a Near Eastern and Judaic Studies major, but changed that, one semester in. I found myself in a drawing class and knew that was what I wanted to do, to be an artist. I studied printmaking and drawing there where I met the man who would become my mentor, Michael Mazur, whose voice and vision are still in my head.
I met my husband who was a graduate student in Music Composition at Brandeis and we have been together ever since.
When I graduated from college, I was awarded a Thomas J Watson Foundation Fellowship to study printmaking in Paris. I returned home to become a painter. I spent 20 years in the studio. In that time, my husband and I had two children, 8 1/2 years apart, before moving to Chapel Hill, NC. We came for my husband to teach Music Composition and Theory in the UNC Music department, where he taught for 27 years.
On my return from Paris, I worked in a publishing company’s art department. After working there for 3 years I went to Queens college in New York City and received my MFA in Painting. We returned to live in Massachusetts as Allen got a job teaching Music Composition at Brandeis.
For 4 months in 1991, we were lucky enough to live in Tuscany. Allen had received a Guggenheim Fellowship and did not have to teach for a year. A colleague of his had just bought a house in a small town in Tuscany and invited us, and our then almost four-year-old son, to live in her house.
We moved to NC in 1996 for my husband to teach at UNC. When we got here, I thought I would continue being a painter, and in fact set up a room in my house to be a studio. But it was not to be. I did not have the kind of time I needed to be a painter, with a very young child. I was also enamored, again, with photography. I had begun my interest in Paris, 20 years earlier, and decided I wanted to print the photos I was taking of the damage from Hurricane Fran, which had arrived a month after we did. That was quite a welcome to NC! I took a darkroom class and learned how to print my own black and white photographs.
In 1997, about a year after we arrived in NC, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had my first mastectomy.
I rented a darkroom shortly after my recovery and continued to work there for 4 years. At that point, we built a darkroom for me in the basement of our house. I continued photographing for many years, using all kinds of cameras – 35 mm film camera, pinhole cameras, Medium format film cameras. After some years I moved on to digital cameras, and, after a fall in 2011, my iPhone, which I have used exclusively in the past 15 years.
There was another diagnosis of breast cancer in 2012, a few months after my mother died. And other falls.
In 2015 I had a monograph printed by Daylight Books entitled SILVER SCREEN. It was a tribute to my mother who had died a few years earlier and her love of the movies from her early years and beyond.
I have had exhibitions in Boston, Cambridge, San Francisco, Los Angeles and, of course, in North Carolina, in Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro and in Chapel Hill. I was represented by George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and back to San Francisco, for 12 years. I have also shown my work at Art Fairs in Miami, Los Angeles, and recently, in London. I will be showing at Paris Photo in November and I will be having an exhibition in Germany in December.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not been a smooth road.
My husband, Allen Anderson, and I had lived in the Boston area for 20 years. In 1996 Allen got the Composer’s position at UNC Chapel Hill. I had lived in the Northeast my entire life, New York and New England. Moving from the Northeast to the South was extremely difficult for me. I felt completely lost, out of my depth. A month after we got here, Hurricane Fran slammed into North Carolina. No power for a week, with young (8 1/2), and very young (4 months old), children. Welcome to North Carolina!
About a year later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. My diagnosis, was non-invasive DCIS, Ductal Carcinoma in Situ so I did not need any adjuvant therapy (chemo); I did, however, need a mastectomy as the cancer was fairly widespread, fairly deep and extensive. The doctor I had seen at the time made a terrible mis-diagnosis, telling me she didn’t think what I had felt, while doing a self-exam, was anything. Hence, my mammogram was delayed by 7 weeks.
I had a second encounter with breast cancer in 2012, and a second mastectomy, 15 years after the first diagnosis. Again, DCIS, so non-invasive. Though this time the cancer was very small, very early, very near the surface, all of this the very opposite of my first diagnosis, I decided to have a second mastectomy so I would not have to worry about breast cancer again.
I have also had a heart condition since 2001. It took a while to diagnose what I had. Generally it has been under control for 25 years. It has worsened in the last few years so I have just had a procedure to stem the problem. I have had 4 other, less invasive, heart procedures in the last 2 1/2 years.
In 2011, I had a bad fall while deinstalling an exhibition in Cary. I broke my ulna, shattered my radius, and had a compression fracture in my pelvis. I needed surgery for the radius, and 3 months bedrest for my pelvis. I couldn’t hold my heavy Leica camera (the camera I had been using at the time) so I switched to my iPhone and have used that exclusively for the last 15 years.
As is evident, I have had a number of challenges in my life. I met the man who would become my husband at 21, and our partnership and love have truly sustained me, as has the love of my children. As importantly, being an artist has been as essential to my health and happiness as anything else.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am a restless artist. I have been an etcher, a draftsperson, a painter, a photographer, a digital artist, a video artist. All of my current work as a photo artist is informed by my experience as a studio artist for 25 years before I picked up a camera in earnest.
I have always been interested in making art about the passage of time. That has held true for almost my entire artistic career. The work I’m making right now holds other qualities as well, and takes me to other places. Still, time passing remains a poetic element of this new work.
Drawing is the foundation of everything I do. Though the actual marks may not be there when I take a photo, the notion of how I would draw a subject, where I place things in relation to their surroundings and each other, remains the armature for how I see and compose, even through a lens.
My first work as an adult artist was an etching of my father as a toddler and my grandparents. (Image #1)
In it, leaves, trees and vines wind in and out of the depictions of my ancestors. My father’s countenance is so tender in this drawing from a photo. I never knew my grandmother and she remains in shadow in the etching.
I was a painter for 20 years before becoming a photographer/photo artist.
I started out doing portraits of friends and family, from observation (image #2)
and ended up doing imagined landscapes from our time living in Tuscany. (Image #3)
When we moved to North Carolina, I became a photographer.
I often photographed flowers (Image #4)
And the woods…
This is an image made up of 35 separate modules. The use of the grid became a big part of my work beginning about 12 years ago. (Image #5)
I have returned to painting of late, and photographing flowers in my garden. I have been painting on my photographs, so far only with white acrylic. But after many years of working in black and white, I have returned to color, in a big way. (Image #6)
And there is one more piece I’d like to share. It is my most recent work, where I return again, but this time to an etching I did in Paris. Working from sketches I made in front of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, I created an etching in the print shop I was working in at the time, Atelier 17, an historic print shop that had been established in 1926. They are, in fact, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the shop for which I was interviewed a few months ago. It brought this etching to mind, in a very powerful way. I decided to use it, and a drawing I did in front of the same painting, decades later, when I was in Paris with my daughter. (Image #7)
As well as making two dimensional art, I have, over the last 15 years, made video work. It began with a collaboration with my husband, Allen Anderson, who is a composer, a commissioned piece for the Digital Art Festival at UNC. We created a few other videos over the years including one for “The Water of Life: Artistic Expressions” festival at UNC. We collaborated again in 2019 for a digital art concert at UNC. In 2020, the Horace Williams House gallery, for which I was co-chair, was essentially closed to the public because of the pandemic. Allen and I began making videos of our exhibitions so that people would be able to see, virtually, what we were exhibiting. I would send him the images of what was being displayed and he would write the electronic music specifically for the art. He would send me the music and I would make a video, syncing my images of the work with his composition.
We also collaborated in 2022 on a project with the UNC Opera Department, on a performance of Hildegard Von Bingen’s 11th century opera, Ordo Virtutum. I created 90+ videos for the opera which were projected for 3 performances at the Contemporary Art Museum. (Image #8)
We will be collaborating again in the next few months, creating a video piece for an exhibition/concert we are having in December in Saarbrücken, Germany.
This is a brief history of the artistic work that I have done over the years.
I have also, for the last 23 years, been on the Art Committee of Preservation Chapel Hill, Horace Williams House. For the last 16, have been Co-Chair of that committee. I have administered, with my co-chair, about 100 exhibitions over the years. It is something that I am extremely proud of, and known for, besides being known as an artist.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
The world is such a different place now than when I was starting out. It was much easier then. Admittedly, I graduated from college with a Fellowship, but after that year I had no idea what I would do to make money. At the end of the summer, after I returned, we went to California so that I could meet Allen’s family. On the plane ride back to New England I imagined I was going to look for a waitress job to support my art. As we were walking in the door, the phone was ringing. It was a friend from Brandeis who wanted to know if I could come in the next day to “audition” for a job in the art department of a new publishing company. It was perfect timing and incredibly lucky. That job lasted for 3 years. I applied and got into an MFA program at Queens College in New York, in Painting, after working for three years. When I returned to the Boston area, I got another job in an art department of an established publishing company. That job came about through one of my colleagues in the first publishing company I had worked for. Again, luck, and also, who you meet along the way. I worked there for many years, but finally decided to go freelance as a graphic designer, which I have done for most of my adult life to support my Art. My sister was a very established graphic designer in New York and I would call her for help when I couldn’t figure out how to do something. It was a combination of work being much easier to come by, and incredible luck. I do not envy young people starting out now.
I would say, however, that if you are determined to be a creative person in your life, you sometimes have to piece together a working life (as opposed to your essential life’s work) to support yourself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tamahochbaum.com
- Instagram: @hightree19
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tama.hochbaum
- Other: https://vimeo.com/user60756962
