Penelope Umbrico's Digital Landscapes from Flickr Archives

Penelope Umbrico, born in Philadelphia in 1957, is a US artist who repurposes digital archives and photo-sharing websites like Flickr to create installations, videos, and multimedia works. She challenges notions of authorship and originality, focusing on the overproduction and compulsive consumption of images in contemporary visual culture. Umbrico scours online platforms for hundreds of photos on a given subject, then reproduces and assembles them into colossal compositions. Her 2006 project "Suns from Sunsets from Flickr" comprises thousands of sunset images from Flickr transformed into large grid installations that highlight the repetitiveness and homogenization of amateur photography in the digital age. Umbrico earned a degree from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Photographers' Gallery. She currently lives and works in New York.