When high winds ripped through the borough’s parks and wooded areas three years ago, most people saw devastation and thousands of downed tree limbs in the aftermath. Barbara Korman saw her next art project.

For the past three years, Korman, a native Bronxite who has lived in Bedford Park for the past 30 years, has gathered downed tree limbs, carted them back to the studio in her apartment near Mosholu Parkway and meticulously shaped and painted them into three dimensional installation pieces.

When put together on display, “it creates a sense of motion,” said Kathleen Reckling, the director of Arts Westchester, where Korman’s limb work is on display. “The way it’s formed, it seems like wind is blowing through them.”

Those pieces are showing this spring in a series of shows in Westchester and, for the first time in two decades, Korman exhibited her work back in the Bronx where the art scene appears to be taking off for, well, the first time ever.

Korman, who is coy about her age (an article in the New York Times from 1992 said she was 53 at the time), is one of the borough’s most accomplished artists. Her work has appeared in more than 100 exhibits at dozens of museums and galleries, including the Neuberger Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grounds for Sculpture, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and Katonah Museum of Art, among others.

A Bronx girl to the core, accent and all, Korman grew up around 174th Street and Walton Avenue before her parents moved out to the northeast Bronx near Pelham Parkway.

From the beginning, Korman says she “always had an interest and ability in the arts.”

She took a bus and a train to attend Music and Arts High School in Manhattan. After graduation, Korman double majored in graphics and sculpture at New York State College of Ceramics.

After encountering some job discrimination — one employer wouldn’t hire her because she wasn’t married and therefore was considered a “security risk” — and turning down a job at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Art and Design because she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her “New Yorker” identity, Korman took a job teaching art in the public school system.

She worked at Co-op City High School and later at Harry S Truman H.S. She never lost her passion for creating her own artwork. For a while, she rented a separate studio for her work, but eventually moved to Bedford Park, where she could afford to have a studio inside her apartment.

In 1991, Korman serendipitously took a buyout from the Board of Education, just in time to catch her “15 minutes of fame.”
In May of 1991, Korman was asked to produce work for the New Year’s display windows for Tiffany’s and Company. Luckily, Korman now had the time to work on it around the clock.

The display was a huge success, landing her in the Times as a “style maker.” She sold each of the pieces used in the display and it led to several commissioned pieces.

“It gave me a certain kind of credibility that people needed,” she says.

Since then, Korman has continued to produce beautiful work that has appeared in galleries throughout the region, but she drifted away from her home borough. Now that’s changing.

In March, Korman displayed her shaped, painted and arranged limbs installation at the BronxArtsSpace, a gallery in the south Bronx run by Linda Cunningham, a SoHo transplant who moved to the borough 12 years ago.

Cunningham said Korman’s artwork was “very well received, people were very intrigued by it. It’s sensual, not sexual, but it can communicate itself. It’s art.”

Up until recently, Cunningham said, “There was no art scene in the Bronx.” But that’s also changing. Energized by the group No Longer Empty, which turned the Andrew Friedman home into an enormous collection of exhibits, Cunningham said arts groups are collaborating like never before.

Korman agrees. She’s thrilled to be back in the middle of something energetic and blossoming, saying, “I’m as excited about being back in the Bronx as I was about Tiffany’s.”

Ed. Note: See Barbara Korman’s work at Arts Westchester, 31 Mamaroneck Ave., White Plains, NY, until May 20. For more information, call (914) 428-4220 or visit artsw.org/sculpture.