Polly Apfelbaum’s artistic practice fuses traditions of painting, craft, and installation. Deploying a wide variety of media—including fabric, paint, dyes, wallpaper, plasticine, and ceramics—her work has dissolved spatial, plastic, and temporal boundaries. She is best known for expansive polychromatic installations, which coalesce the radical and the beautiful, simultaneously domestic and irreverent. Her sensibility is informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of the applied arts, art history, and popular culture.

Apfelbaum has shown her work consistently in the United States and internationally since her first solo show in 1986. Recently she has had solo exhibitions at Frith Street Gallery in London, and at Alexander Grey Associates in New York, IKON Gallery in Birmingham, England, and Belvedere 21 in Vienna, Austria. A major traveling mid-career survey of her work initiated by the ICA Philadelphia debuted in 2003, and was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue of her work. Selected collections include The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum. Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia Museum, and The Dallas Museum. She has received prestigious grants and accolades from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1987, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Joan Mitchell Foundation.