Evaluator Marsha Klein (Artist)

BIO: Marsha Klein's art is full of energy and the raw vision of a waking dream. Klein’s art career has spanned nearly fifty years creating bold, expressive oil paintings and organic ceramic sculpture. Her passion for art began as a teenager when she discovered the art museums of her native New York City. Klein majored in art and art history at Brooklyn College and received her BA degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied drawing with R.B. Kitaj and ceramics with Peter Voulkos and Ron Nagle at the peak of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in 1964-68. In her early sculpture, she responded literally to the emphasis on bodies in connection to nature, with torsos, heads, arms, and feet sprouting wings, flowers, cacti and roots. After twenty years spent focusing on sculpture, in 1989, she returned to painting, using the body as metaphor to address the human psyche. For forty years she worked as artist in the schools, teaching clay classes and designing/directing community mural projects. Klein’s work has been exhibited nationally, in galleries and museums. She lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area.