Barbara Takenaga lives and works in New York City and Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is the Mary A. and William Wirt Warren Professor of Art at Williams College. Her work has been exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; MASS MoCA, North Adams; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento; San Jose Museum of Art;  the National Academy Museum, New York; and the Williams College Museum of Art. Takenaga has been featured in publications such as Art in America, Art News, the New York Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Takenaga’s palette of primarily blues and reds brings to mind natural elements, which coalesce in a shifting topography, alternating between order and chaos. As magical as the works appear, it is easy to associate them with familiar phenomena in nature: from rugged coastlines to images of supernovas from the Hubble Space Telescope. One of the more striking aspects of the newer works is their depiction of an infinite space in which foreground and background are nearly interchangeable, and perspective itself is elusive. Many of the works, which feature a phantasmagoria of explosive color, are suggestive of a kaleidoscope whose constructed images are in a constant state of fluidity, motion, and transformation.