Alli Berman

Biography

Alli Berman is an abstract painter and interactive installation artist who believes we are all connected. All of us. She explores the concept of connectivity and community using fundamental artist tools: color, line, texture, and touch. Berman experienced a stroke in her mid-thirties and went to her studio in Bali to heal, and it was there that her art came alive.

“My performative interactive process offers multiple perspectives and promotes tolerance as it opens the lines of communication and lowers barriers: cultural, racial, and generational. This durational process promotes peaceful civil and social conversations and is a great equalizer.”

Berman’s installations comprise of dozens to hundreds of squares. They have been created up to 120 feet long and become a safe immersive environment that is essentially a collaborative effort, meditation, and renewal at the same time.

In a process that takes many months, she paints hundreds of American hardwood squares, layering up to three dozen transparent glazes to create a dialogue between the colors. The pieces are then attached to a surface and can be moved by the viewer to create unlimited compositions. There is no right or wrong when choosing, moving, and reconnecting the pieces.

She studied with dozens of artists during extensive travel for the past 48+ years in Indonesia, Peru, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Galapagos Islands, China, Norway, more. Winning dozens of awards, grants and residencies, Berman has been influenced by Hado’s acrylic glazes since childhood, later by Frankenthaler, Motherwell, Pollack, Still, Twombly, and Kline.

Over 500,000 people in 50+ countries have connected to Berman’s art in more than one hundred exhibits and installations. Her work is exhibited in museums, galleries, hospitals, and art centers, and represented in numerous private, corporate, nonprofit and government collections worldwide.

Berman lives and paints on Long Island, NY.  Pre-Covid, she traveled regularly to her other studios in Bali, New Zealand, Cayman Islands, and Montana. She yearns to get back to them.

Artist statement

One person’s decisions and actions can affect millions. We are all connected, all of us. My moveable interactive installation art explores the concept of connectivity and community. My touchable and viewable paintings examine the intersection of relationships and feelings.

Close family ties, American upbringing combined with the influence of living and painting in five studios around the world for the past 42 years manifest themselves in my work. The intensity of the tropical sun, the exciting musical rhythms, and the daily cultural similarities and differences I encounter set up epiphanies that infuse my abstract work. Most of my paintings combine pure, vibrant layered colors, oneiric imagery, flowing lines, and numerology. They are imbued with a fundamental passion for family, love, continuity, and connectivity.

My first memories of color and form are the swirling demons, smiling animals, and dancing, leaping forms on the mattress cover my father made for me. For the first fifteen years of my life that I slept on that bed, I would hold my breath and slowly lift the sheet up to reveal different parts of the ever-changing scenes below. I would disappear into that world for long periods of time. I would sleep and the shapes would appear in my dreams all night long. My paintings talk to me; dancing, twisting, jumping forms moving to the earliest rhythms inside me.

I paint to achieve a physical and spiritual equilibrium and connectivity in my art and in my life. I wanted to pursue balance and a feeling of peace using layers of contrasting colors. My paintings started to develop a dialogue. The colors would talk to each other and to me. I began my interactive modular art to find many different connections. What started as a simple exercise to help me find personal answers grew into an interactive art form that has traveled the globe these past 45+ years. And I have realized an important truth over the decades and especially the months of the Pandemic: for good and for bad, we ARE all connected!