Pam Lins, Lewis Center for the Arts

Interim Director of Visual Arts; Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts

Photo courtesy Pam Lins

About

Pam Lins is an artist and educator who works across disciplines, from painting to sculpture to photography to designing stools. Her work addresses how the historical can be used as a material to address contemporary conditions such as loss and absence, the swipe, the flatness and limitations of an image, emotions in classical sculpture, the use of models, issues of display, muscle aches from using a computer, color as a language, how the built work expresses its time, and the democracy and politics of applied materials. Her work repeatedly disrupts the sculptural with the pictorial and vice versa. Additionally, Lins embraces the problems and situations of sculptural presentation while the work conflates past, present, and future times. She jams together these categories and tries to sort them out.

Other bodies of work have been more collaborative and social. Lins has spent a lot of time over the years in what have been called clubs, specifically Ceramics Club. In 2007, she founded Ceramics Club with students from Cooper Union, and the club continues today. These clubs create social spaces that produce material to different ends or no ends. Ceramics Club has often sold ceramics to raise money for progressive organizations and individuals in need as a type of direct action. Lins is also interested in clubs as a critique of the professionalization of the art market. For example, her project, ISS (International Space Station), was the result of a residency at Greenwich House Pottery, where 120 people including artists, non-artists, children, and students were invited by Lins and her collaborators to make objects for an event at MoMA PS1 that was part fundraiser, part installation, part moon-themed bar, part musical performance, and part party. Additional fundraisers/shows have been installed at New York's White Columns Gallery in 2022 and 2025.

Lins lives and maintains a studio in Brooklyn, New York, and she has shown work in a variety of venues from museums and galleries to artist-run spaces and backyards. Recent exhibitions include Rm 3557 in Los Angeles, the Humor Biennial in Bulgaria, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. She has participated in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Queens, New York; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, New York; and she participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. She is represented by Uffner and Liu Gallery in NYC. Lins is the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, and the Howard Foundation at Brown University.

Lins has taught at Princeton University since 2010. She was appointed full-time lecturer in 2014 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2021. Lins served as the Associate Director of the Program in Visual Arts from 2018 to 2025. A celebrated arts educator, she has been a formative participant in structuring the visual arts program and has taught the Senior Seminar, painting, and sculpture classes. Lins has also brought numerous visiting artists and lecturers to the program. She considers teaching a reciprocal practice of engagement and integral to how she lives and works. As a teacher, Lins encourages students to examine their pre-conceived notions of art making, see their work in current and historical contexts, and understand how their individual worldview fuels their work and produces critical thinking. Previously, she taught at The Cooper Union School of Art, The Milton Avery MFA School of Art at Bard College, Hunter College, and various educational institutions throughout the U.S.

Lins received her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. She has been a visiting artist at numerous institutions, most recently at Vassar and Middlebury Colleges.