Blaise Tobia

Blaise Tobia (born January 20, 1953) is a contemporary artist and photographer who lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is married to sculptor, Virginia Maksymowicz.

Early Life and Education

Tobia was born in Brooklyn, New York, to working-class, Sicilian-American parents. He attended Stuyvesant High School, and went on to study art on the undergraduate level at Brooklyn College, CUNY: photography with Walter Rosenblum, George Krause, Jack Lessinger and Robert D'Alessandro; drawing with Philip Pearlstein; and sculpture with Ron Mehlman. After receiving his BA in 1974, he headed for California, to become part of the MFA program at the University of California, San Diego. Along the way, he visited the ranch of Stanley Marsh 3, photographing two recently completed artworks on the land: Robert Smithson's Amarillo Ramp and the Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch. Tobia's one-of-a-kind book, Cadillac Ranch Sequences, was accepted into the Ant Farm's archive in 2003.

At UCSD, he worked with Fred Lonidier and Phel Steinmetz, as well as Allan Kaprow, Newton and Helen Harrison, Eleanor and David Antin, Manny Farber, Moira Roth and David Ross. He was also involved with Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler, who had recently graduated from the program. During that time, he worked as an assistant to Gerry MacAllister, the Director of the Mandeville Gallery, which put him in contact with artists such as Suzanne Lacy, Miriam Shapiro and Barbara Smith. As well, he acted as a photographer and facilitator for performance artists Lynn Hershman, Laurie Anderson and Norma Jean Deak.

Career

Tobia and Maksymowicz returned to New York City (living in TriBeCA) where they both worked as artists-in-residence under Title 6 of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). Tobia's two-year residency came under the umbrella of the Foundation for the Community of Artists. There he worked on the documentation team along with photographers Sarah Wells and George Malave, and writers Judd Tully and Ellin Burke. Tobia's photos appear in print in the Cultural Council Foundation Artists Project Complete archives of the CCF Artist Project are housed in the New York City Department of Records.

After the CCF CETA Project terminated in 1981, Tobia moved first to Oberlin, Ohio and subsequently spent two years in Detroit, where he taught photography part-time at Wayne State University where he met fellow photo artists Marilyn Zimmerman and John Ganis. His documentary photography developed concurrently with his own form of "extended" form of documentary photography. His photographic series of converted bank buildings, Pillars of the Community, appears in Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories, and Strategies.

After returning to New York, Tobia continued to work with FCA on its monthly newspaper, Artworkers News, later renamed Art&Artists with artist/editor, Elliott Barowitz. He became active with a variety of politically oriented artists' groups such as Art Against Apartheid, Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, Visual AIDs, and Political Art Documentation/Distribution. During this time, he intersected with Lucy Lippard, Herb Perr, Greg Scholette, Willie Birch, Faith Ringgold, Clarissa Sligh and Jimmie Durham.

In 1985, Tobia began splitting his time between New York City and Philadelphia when he was hired to design and build a new Photography Program at Drexel University. Moving into experimenting with digital photography in the late 1980s and early 1990s (at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, ME), he went on to co-develop Drexel's first major in Digital Media.

Awards

Tobia has received grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and Drexel University. He has been a visiting artist at the Vermont Studio Center (2007) and the American Academy in Rome (2006; 2012; 2014).

His photographs have been included in Sculpture Magazine, Leonardo Magazine, and in books such as Lure of the Local and Site Matters.