Sculptor and painter (focus on drawing) Noa Bornstein was born in San Rafael, California and grew up in Los Angeles. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Fine Art , minor in Dance Theater (unofficial) from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She moved to New York City in 1986, directly from Europe after a traveling show of drawing studies for her 100′ L.A. mural showed at cultural institutions in Belgium and Vienna, Austria. In New York she completed a 90′ mural commission for the Harlem Rehabilitation Center in 1987.
Her work developed into 3 dimensions almost suddenly after the death of her father in 1994. She has related that, “perhaps it was only sculpture that could get at the changing shape of the cloud in my father’s profile.” In 1996 she showed, “Small works to see, touch, and hold” at Caelum Gallery in SoHo. She visited centers for the visually impaired and sent out invitations in Braille after learning about methods people without site use to visualize an object.
Her Duo show, “Survival of the Fittest” at P339 Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, November 2013, featured her life-size and miniature animal sculptures that were available to be touched. Bornstein’s sculpture, Scapegoat, made from a bench, was available to sit on.
Recent group exhibitions of drawings include “Discourse on Drawing, International Contemporary Drawing”, at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, 2017. Her small sculptures have shown with Sculpturesite in their Northern California galleries from 2005 and SOFA Chicago, in 2008. Earlier group exhibitions include at the Walter Randel Gallery in Manhattan in 2009 where Bornstein’s mixed-media sculpture of a rooster(I Want to Live) and two miniature bronze sculptures were shown alongside historic sculptures from disparate parts of the world.
Bornstein’s intimate bronze sculpture, Live Well! has been installed in several parks and pedestrian walkways around the U.S. including in TriBeCa Park in lower Manhattan, under the auspices of New York City’s Department of Parks (2000) and in Lakeland, Florida, sponsored by The Polk Museum of Art (2001) and in Pearlstone Park, Baltimore, Maryland (2007). The 11″ bronze figure waves his hat in heartfelt greeting or fond farewell. Mounted to a bronze pine tree base, it’s like a small monument that looks up at people saying, “Go on, live. Just do it as well as you can.” The sculpture was also installed near a man-made waterfall in Summit, NJ (2005) along with six other sculptures comprising, Shangri-La in Miniature.
In Fall 2017 she was invited to participate in “It’s Happening! 50 Year Celebration of Art in NYC Parks” in Central Park, with her 11″ bronze, “Praying Mantis Seeks Friends” mounted on a tree trunk base. In July 2018, her life-size sculpture of a Pig (What about me, Pig?) will take a turn seeking friends in Queensbridge Park, Queens, NY, sponsored by City Parks Foundation’s SummerStage.
Bornstein’s work has been cited and featured in Artnews, and in many major newspapers including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Brooklyn Skyline, The Denver Post, and Le Soir (Brussels). Her Los Angeles mural was featured in Art in America, Annual Guide, ’85-’86. A profile of Bornstein and the impact of the mural was published in December 2012: Magritte in Los Angeles on KCET TV ONLINE
Awards for Bornstein’s sculpture include a First Place award from the late gallerist Holly Solomon for her piece at the Hecksher Museum (1996), the Knox Gallery Award for Cast Bronze from the North American Sculpture Biennial in Colorado (2000), and First Place for “Images of Social Justice, Small Works, Big Heart”, Saint Joseph’s College, Brooklyn, NY (2006).
In 2012, she received a scholarship to study lithography at the Manhattan Graphics Center in NYC and created a limited edition based on her drawing, “Ach” (the word for “brother” in Arabic and Hebrew). Bornstein has been studying Arabic (with additional courses in Hebrew) at ABC Languages school in Manhattan since 2010. Her life-size bronze sculpture installation, “Peace Gorilla”, was installed in November 2020 during the pandemic, in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, across from the UN. The project is under the auspices of NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks Program. The subtitle “Shalom, Salaam Tomodachi” (Hello, peace friend– in Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese) and the words for friend in 90 languages are cast into the concrete base.