Ann Toebbe

Toebbe grew up in Cincinnati and attended Seton High School, an all girls Catholic school. She earned a BFA in sculpture from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1997.[3][4] In 1994 and 1995 she attended the Chautauqua School of Art summer residency and in 1995 participated in Parsons School of Design's NY Studio program. After graduation she worked for five years as an art handler in galleries and museums, living in Brooklyn, New York.[3] In 2000 Toebbe attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Toebbe earned an MFA in painting from Yale University in 2004.[4]

Toebbe was the recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in 2003.[1] She was awarded a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship for study in Berlin in 2004–05. Living in Neukölln she attended the Universität der Kunste and studied German at the Tandem Language School in Prenzlauer Berg.

Toebbe had her first solo exhibition in 2007 at ThreeWalls Gallery in Chicago. In 2010 she met Steven Zevitas through artist Kanishka Raja (1970-2018) and was offered a solo exhibition at Steven Zevitas Gallery in May 2010. Because of her multi-perspective compositions, Toebbe was aligned with the Faux Naïve movement in contemporary art. Toebbe became interested in collage while working for visual artist Arturo Herrera.[3] Toebbe started introducing collage elements into her paintings in 2011 which she calls collage paintings. Hand painting all of her collage paper, she employs a meticulous system of drawing, measuring, tracing, and cutting to construct a painting.

Toebbe's collages consist of pieces of colored paper that are cut up and recreate the interiors of homes that she and others around her have inhabited.[9]

In January 2015, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith situated Toebbe's work as part of what she called “the stay-at-home intimist tradition that begins with Édouard Vuillard’s Parisian interiors.”[9] Toebbe's later work has revolved around adulthood and the changing domestic landscapes created by marriages, divorces and remarriages. As a result, Toebbe's work, Smith wrote, displayed a “weird architectural family tree”[9] and that "both craft and details boggle the mind." Smith likened Toebbe's work to that of a "pop-up dollhouse" in which "spatial tensions become entwined with emotional histories that we can only imagine but that are invariably told from conflicting perspectives."[9] Smith noted that Toebbe's interest in modern-day homes as a source for art is shared with contemporary painters like Sarah McEneaney and Jonas Wood, as well as the outsider artist James Charles Castle. Smith called the topic “a subject that never stops giving.”[9]

In late 2015, art critic Jerry Saltz called Toebbe's exhibition at the Monya Rowe gallery one of the 10 best art shows of 2015. Saltz described Toebbe's work as containing “spatially layered, fine-toothed realism,” and added that “her inner Vuillard mingles with cryptic color and Escher-like space.”[2]

From 2006 until 2008 Toebbe wrote reviews for the art magazine Beautiful/Decay. She has taught drawing classes at Northwestern University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College Chicago.[1] She has been a visiting artist at Indiana University,[1] The Peninsula School of Art, and Sarah Lawrence College. In 2013, at the invitation of Annie Morris, Toebbe gave an Artist Connect talk at the Art Institute of Chicago, connecting her work to the American artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). Toebbe has done audio interviews for the podcasts Bad at Sports (2018) and I Like Your Work (2019). In 2016 she traveled to Northern India on a Sustainable Arts Grant to research Indian miniature painting.

Toebbe is married with two daughters and lives in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.[12]