By Brian D’Ambrosio
Walk into Santa Fe artist Barbara Mehlman’s studio and you quickly realize you have not entered a conventional workspace. You’ve entered a mind in motion.
Sheets hang from ceilings like suspended ghosts. Wire structures lean against walls. Yarn spills from corners. Fragile paper sculptures appear mid-metamorphosis. Digital sketches glow from an iPad. A nightstand wrapped in vinyl waits to become part of an installation. Somewhere, welded steel components built by a fabricator in his 80s are waiting for their cue.
Nothing looks finished because, in Mehlman’s world, “finished” is often a temporary illusion.
Her studio is less workspace than ecosystem—a perpetual, evolving art environment where ideas are tested, dismantled, rebuilt, flattened, suspended, sewn together, and occasionally abandoned. It is laboratory, sanctuary, and confessional booth.
“This is like a conversation within yourself,” Mehlman says. “I want art to achieve the deepest, most provocative, outrageous conversations that I could have.”
That conversation can last years.
One installation in her studio has been evolving for more than two years. Another took three. She does not begin with rigid blueprints or tidy conclusions. Her process is intuitive, almost archaeological.
“It’s completely pitch dark and there’s this tiny little thread,” she says. “And if I pull it, I can go one more step.”
That thread has guided her for most of her life.
Mehlman earned a master’s degree of fine arts in painting and installation art from Claremont Graduate University in California and has taught natural and digital media at California College of the Arts, San Francisco State University, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She has also completed artist residencies and developed what she calls “artitorials”—generative digital art poems created in real time around live events.
Before that, she briefly traveled a more conventional path.
Her father, a psychologist who once worked with behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, strongly encouraged her to pursue psychology. Mehlman grew up in a household full of books and ideas. Her father wrote novels and stories. Her mother loved art. At age 6, her parents gave her the garage as a creative space.
Most children used garages to store bicycles. Mehlman used hers as a laboratory.
“I would go in there as a 6-year-old like a mad scientist,” she says.
She spent hours every day drawing, while other children played outside. Later, at UC Berkeley, she entered a selective psychology program. She performed well academically—but one moment changed everything.
She remembers sitting at a kitchen table with her actress roommate, who excitedly talked about reading a script. Mehlman looked down at her statistics homework and felt nothing.
“I thought, I don’t feel that way about this.”
She pivoted, applied to UC Santa Barbara, and completed an art degree in roughly a year after administrators waived lower-division requirements.
The practical concerns never fully disappeared.
She taught as many as nine classes per semester—three times a normal teaching load—to afford her studio and artistic life. Then she would return to her workspace, change into what she calls her “happy pants,” and work late into the night.
Sleep, apparently, was optional. So was artistic predictability.
Her materials often sound as improvised as her ideas: cheap white cotton sheets, yarn, wire, paper, rust, paint, found objects. She loves old bedsheets because they absorb rust stains and tear beautifully. Paper can be molded, sewn, cut apart, and rebuilt. Digital media allows repetition and scale manipulation.
Her installations frequently explore bodily discomfort, emotional restriction, family dynamics, grief, and personal reinvention—but with visual humor and oddball charm.
One piece began with childhood insecurities about her body after her mother suggested she wear heels to make her legs appear more proportional. Mehlman responded by building enormous wire legs. Then she invited friends outside to flatten them.
Another work features a sexy yarn plant perched near a nightstand. That sentence may not fully clarify the piece. That’s part of the point.
Her work resists neat interpretation because Mehlman herself distrusts neat answers. She believes modern life increasingly pressures people toward speed, certainty, and instant consumption.
She spent time in Silicon Valley during the late 1980s and early 1990s as a software designer and inventor, creating experimental “slow art” animations that deliberately resisted the tech industry’s obsession with speed.
It was not exactly embraced.
“Everybody wanted faster and faster,” she says.
Mehlman prefers slowness. Ambiguity. Imperfection.
Over time, Mehlman has come to see the studio not simply as a place where art is made, but also as a vehicle for personal and artistic metamorphosis. The space has allowed her to redefine her work while quietly reordering her priorities. Pieces that once leaned heavily toward tragedy, grief, and darker emotional terrain have gradually given way to something more expansive—still searching, still vulnerable, but increasingly open to humor, hope, and the strange privilege of being alive. In that sense, the studio has become both workshop and witness, documenting her evolution as faithfully as any finished installation.
She also embraces delight. After years of creating darker work influenced by tragedy, mortality, and collective trauma, she has gradually moved toward something lighter—without becoming simplistic. The death of her lifelong best friend recently forced another emotional recalibration.
“She was the period at the end of the sentence,” Mehlman says.
Now she must supply her own certainty. Or perhaps uncertainty. That may be the real engine of her work.
In Mehlman’s studio, art remains gloriously unresolved. Objects migrate from one project to another. Sculptures evolve. Ideas collide. Failure is expected. Interpretation remains optional.
The space feels alive because it is alive—constantly rearranging itself around one woman’s restless imagination. Mehlman doesn’t always understand what she’s making. That has never stopped her.
“I don’t understand life,” she says. “But I wouldn’t know how to do anything else.”
Perhaps that’s the secret hidden inside her joyful chaos. Some artists create answers; Mehlman creates better questions and makes them beautiful enough that you don’t mind getting lost inside them.
