Bonnie Levinson is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses painting, mixed media, photography, printmaking, and works on paper. Her practice is rooted in a lifelong engagement with contemporary art and shaped by an unusual trajectory that has moved between making art, working with artists, and helping to shape some of the country’s leading cultural institutions.
Levinson studied religion, fine arts, and drama at Kenyon College. Following graduation, she received a Thomas J. Watson Foundation National Fellowship Award for a year of independent study and travel abroad, investigating pottery as an expressive form reflecting national character. She later earned a Master of Arts in Teaching Museum Education from The George Washington University and continued her art studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, City College of San Francisco, and Colorado Mountain College.
Alongside her artistic practice, Levinson built a distinguished career at the intersection of art, education, and cultural leadership. She served as Deputy Director of External Affairs and Acting Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and as Vice President for Development at The New York Public Library. Through her arts consulting practice, she later served as curator for the visual arts at Federal Hall National Memorial in New York, developing exhibitions and large-scale installations that brought contemporary artists into dialogue with ideas of democracy. She also directed and co-curated an arts education and artist residency program at Making Waves Academy in Richmond, California, commissioning artists to create permanent public works for the campus.
Throughout those years, making and looking at art remained a constant. That lifelong engagement—with artists, museums, collections, and ideas—continues to inform her studio practice today.
Levinson’s work moves between abstraction and the observed world, often beginning with a place, a photograph, a memory, a garden, water, or an unexpected visual encounter. Through layering, transformation, experimentation, and an openness to chance, recognizable sources can become ambiguous and newly imagined. Across media, her work explores the shifting territory between what is seen, what is remembered, and what is perceived.
Her work has been presented in solo, juried, and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Recent presentations include the Cornell Museum of Art, Coral Springs Museum of Art, Palm Beach State College, and the Cultural Council for Palm Beach County. In 2023, her solo exhibition Metanoia presented 49 works at Roxbury Abbey in New York’s Catskill Mountains. At the Boca Raton Innovation Campus (BRIC), Levinson has both exhibited her own work and curated Multiple Visions exhibitions bringing together fellow artists from the Arts Warehouse community.
Her work is held in private collections across the United States. Following a three-year residency at Arts Warehouse in Delray Beach, Levinson established Studio 1608 in West Palm Beach, where she maintains her primary studio and creates opportunities for conversation and exchange around contemporary art. She divides her time between Florida and New York.
