Annette Barbier was a video and digital artist whose work influenced her teaching at Northwestern University and Columbia College Chicago, where she was chair of the interactive arts and media department.
'She brought both video and digital art to Northwestern — it wasn't there,' said colleague and filmmaker Michelle Citron. 'She was really insightful and thoughtful and generous, and she observed. That's what she did first, and that made her a great teacher and a great friend.'
Barbier, 66, died June 5 in Northwestern Memorial Hospital of complications from a bone marrow disorder, according to her daughter, Celine Browning. She had lived in the Chicago area most of her life.
Barbier was born and grew up in Hegewisch on Chicago's Southeast Side. After attending St. Francis de Sales High School, she went to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree. She went on to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a master's degree in fine art.
'She took photos starting at a very early age,' Browning said. 'There's a photo of her holding a camera at about age 5.'
Working first in sculpture, art was her way of interpreting and understanding the world around her and communicating her vision to others, her daughter said. 'This was the way that ideas flowed for her — through visual art.'
Barbier's interest in visual art soon found expression through what she called feminist video in the 1970s. 'She was an early video artist back when video wasn't really considered art,' said her daughter.
Many of her art projects were done in collaboration with her husband, Drew Browning, who survives her. The two met at the University of Illinois and studied together at the Art Institute.
One of their collaborations, 'Approach,' uses motion data of two people, one in a wheelchair and one walking, to make a life-size installation on a 75-foot-long fence at the Prairie Center of the Arts in Peoria showing the intersecting paths of human motion and the traces left behind in passages through life.
Celine Browning said her parents also collaborated on the grant-funded 'Expose Intervene Occupy' project in Chicago, in which smartphone users could access visions of what Browning called 'augmented reality' on and around downtown buildings.
Barbier joined the faculty of Northwestern in 1982 as associate professor in the department of radio/television/film. She moved from there to Columbia in 2005 as associate professor and chair of the interactive arts and media department. She moved to emeritus status in 2012.
Doreen Bartoni knew Barbier at Northwestern and hired her for the Columbia post. In an email, Bartoni said: 'Annette provided stellar leadership over the department and infused an artistic and inclusive approach to a historically technical discipline. I was particularly impressed with her initiatives to get girls interested in gaming as well as her focus on the importance of gender representation.'
Barbier's work has been collected widely and has won her a number of grants and awards. One of those was a Fulbright lectureship that took her to India in early 1988 to teach video making to Indian women as well as work on her own art. Her daughter, about 2 years old then, came with, grounding Barbier in her own responsibilities as a mother even as the child wandered into some of the videos she was making of Indian women at work.
Mindy Faber, who worked with Barbier at the Art Institute and later at Columbia, called her a pioneering, groundbreaking artist, internationally acclaimed for her videos.
Faber said the work evolved over time, moving from exploring issues of female identity to concerns with nature, ecology and climate.
'The last work she produced was about the environment,' Citron said. 'She cared deeply about it.' That concern took in farming practices, species extinction, pollution, even collisions of migrating birds into Chicago high-rises.
'I think her work was trying to get us to understand our place in the world,' Citron said.
Barbier also is survived by her sister Joyce McClellan.
A celebration of her life will be from 1 to 6 p.m. Saturday in Barbier's studio, 319 N. Albany St., Chicago.
Graydon Megan
(2017-06-16)

|||