Tara Donovan (American, b. 1969) makes large-scale sculptures and installations by accumulating enormous quantities of a single mass-produced object, such as plastic cups, drinking straws,toothpicks or index cards, into forms that evoke geological or biological structures.She was born in Flushing, New York, and lives and works between Brooklyn and Long Island City.
Donovan studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York before earning a BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in 1991 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1999.She worked as a waitress and bartender to support herself through school and the early years of her career. In 2000 her copper electrical-cable floor installation Ripple was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.In 2001 she won the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation's Biennial Competition.In 2005 she became the inaugural recipient of the Calder Foundation's Calder Prize, which funded a six-month residency at the sculptor Alexander Calder's former studio, the Atelier Calder, in Saché, France.In 2008 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, informally known as the genius grant, which came with $500,000 in unrestricted funding.
In 2003 she stacked over two million clear plastic drinking straws against a 42-foot gallery wall for the installation Haze, evoking a fog bank or diaphanous cloud.For the FLAG Art Foundation's debut exhibition “Attention to Detail” in 2008, curated by Chuck Close, she made a sculpture of over a million wooden toothpicks that resembled a haystack from a distance.She began working with styrene cards in a 2014 Pace Gallery installation, later developing them into the wall-based Compositions (Cards) series shown at Pace Gallery in 2017.For the exhibition “Wonder” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery in 2015 and 2016, she stacked about a million index cards into ten spires eight to thirteen feet tall.She presented a site-specific version of Untitled (Plastic Cups) in the group exhibition “Hyperobjects” at Ballroom Marfa.
Pace Gallery, which opened its first Seoul space in 2017, gave Donovan her inaugural exhibition in Korea there.Through Pace Verso's 2022 partnership with the generative art platform Art Blocks, she released the generative NFT series QWERTY, which renders repeating arrangements of a single computer-keyboard letter or symbol.In 2025 she showed prints made by peeling the reflective layer from used CDs and scattering the debris over paper before running it through a hydraulic press, exhibited at the IFPDA print fair in New York.
