about

Born in London and raised in Rome and New York, Judith Barnes works in the visual and performing arts. Known as a “soprano-impresario”  (The New Yorker), she is the founding artistic director of Vertical Player Repertory, an indie opera company in Brooklyn that “has developed a following for intense performances of unusual works”  (The New York Times), staging opera in urban venues such as an oil tanker at the Red Hook Marine Terminal and a factory courtyard on the Gowanus Canal. Praised as “vocally and dramatically present in every moment”  (Parterre), she has inhabited an eclectic assortment of operatic roles from the 17th to the 21st centuries, and has been recognized as a stage director of “matchless and unending imagination” (ConcertoNet). She is a voice teacher and opera workshop director, a published translator of literature and poetry, and has adapted opera libretti from numerous languages. In past and parallel lives she has been a sculptor, woodworker, carpenter, and conga drum builder at Skin on Skin AfroCuban Percussion in Brooklyn. For more info about Vertical Player Repertory, please visit  www.vpropera.org

Training in vocal performance
The Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University
OperaWorks L.A.; Ann Baltz
Creating the Dramatic Character in Opera; Lauren Flanigan, American Opera Projects and the SITI company
Bel Canto Bootcamp; Rachelle Jonck & Derrick Goff
Voice study with Virginia Zeani, Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, Klara Barlow, Diana Soviero, David Jones, Francesca Mondanaro
Mind Body Music School Integrated Musicians Certificate Program, in progress

Training in visual arts
The New York Studio School (Bruce Gagnier, Jock Ireland, Elaine DeKooning, Leland Bell, John Lees)
The Art Students League (Marshall Glasier, José de Creeft)
Greenwich House Pottery (Peter Lane)
Studies with Pat Passlof, Ben Dienes
Studio apprentice to sculptor José de Creeft

Teaching
Active Private Voice Studio
Opera Workshop Director and Voice Instructor, Lucy Moses School at Kaufman Center, 2010-present
Past positions:
Director of Summer Vocal Arts, Brooklyn Music School, 2018-2021
Voice instructor, Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, Brooklyn Conservatory, Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory
Opera Stage Director: La Guardia HS, CityWide Youth Opera, Manhattan School of Music Baroque Aria Workshop

Exhibitions
Salon des Refusés, BWAC Gallery, 481 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn NY, 2024
Gowanus Open Studios, Behind the Door, Brooklyn, NY, 2018
Sculptural work featured in Women of Salt and Longing, a live performance at the LEIMAY SOAK Festival, 2018
Group Show at The Old Garage Gallery, Pine Hill, NY, 2016
Solo show at Basta Pasta, NYC, 2014
PROCESS: GOWANUS, Norte Maar Curated Studio Tour, 2014
Gowanus Open Studios at New Clay Studios, Brooklyn, NY, yearly 2010-2017

Other affiliations
LEIMAY Fellow, 2016-2018
Member of New Clay Studios, Brooklyn, 2010-2020

artist statement

I am an artist who practices various disciplines, as a singer, sculptor, and theater maker. My roots are in the visual arts, and I pursue a parallel vocation as an opera singer and director. In recent years, I have returned to a studio practice I had put on hold while concentrating on opera. I continue to perform, direct, and teach opera, while developing a new body of sculptural work, and I serve as artistic director of the indie opera company Vertical Player Repertory.

I have been pulled all my life between the poles of the most ephemeral, music, and that most durable of art forms, sculpture, polarities that nonetheless have commonalities. With my singing, I seek to catch a wave of invisible, spiritual structure. When I envision, produce and perform opera theater, I feel that I’m creating a sculpture in time, space, and sound. I love the collaborative nature of performance, whether collaborating with colleagues or audience. Working in the art studio, a more solitary pursuit, engages me in an ongoing conversation with the vivid voices of art history.

about my recent sculpture

Since early times, clay has been pressed into forms that reflect, extend and support the human body. The clay figure, with its hard fleshiness, holds a unique spiritual charge. The clay vessel holds water, food, the ashes of the dead. The vessel protects and encloses an empty space full of possibility. In sculpture that always refers back to the body, I look to shape the empty space inside form, the inside/outside of the body/vessel, the conflicting experience of the body as a deeply interior place and yet an external, protective shell. I am drawn to explore both the fragility and the endurance of our physical being. The visceral experience of wrestling form from earth, water, and fire mirrors my own wrestling match with my body and its limitations and contours.

mentors

My teachers in the visual arts have included Pat Passlof and Ben Dienes, with whom I studied painting as a teenager, the potter Ellen King, who taught me how to work with clay in her Brooklyn studio, and Elaine DeKooning, Leland Bell, Jock Ireland, John Lees and Bruce Gagnier at the New York Studio School. I was introduced to large scale figure drawing by Marshall Glasier at the Art Students League, and studied ceramic technique with Peter Lane at Greenwich House Pottery. I was apprenticed to sculptor José de Creeft in his Chelsea, NYC studio, and learned traditional carving techniques with the woodcarver Orsós Jakab in Hungary. I worked as assistant to Jay Bereck of Skin on Skin Percussion in Brooklyn, NY, building conga drums. Other important mentors and influences include family friends Milton Hebald, John Waddell, Nancy Spero and Leon Golub.

CONTACT JUDITH: vpropera@gmail.com

Photo credits:
Top, Michael Nagle for The New York Times; bottom, Frances Burgos Linares