Who is Bari J Ackerman?
I'm an artist. As a very visual person, I probably always was, but I didn't always create art. I was a fashionista sort in high school, and I was crazy for interior design. But I was busy singing and dancing and being an actress. I never ever thought I could make art. My mom was the artist. I was the actress. That was that.
I came to art in my early thirties as a way to express myself when my children were young. Out of college, I had worked in advertising. And though I started college as a theatre major I graduated college with a degree in Social Sciences and Women's Studies. Not really related to art, I'd say.
But when our now almost grown girls were little, I was always puttering around. I wanted our home to be different. I didn't want it to look like a page from a Pottery Barn catalog. I wanted it to look like us. And I also didn't want to dress from a catalog. At the time, I started making jewelry from found objects and then collage art as well.
Soon I was sewing handbags and created a small business under the name Bari J. selling luscious fabric bags... and the Curated Maximalist Style was born (though I didn't know that quite yet). After several years, I decided I needed my own fabric for the bags, and with a background in graphic design for advertising, I started teaching myself to design fabric. A year later, I licensed my first line of fabric. It was a "painterly" line called Full Bloom that most assumed I had painted by hand. But I hadn't. For years I continued to create art just in the computer... and then I took the leap. Paint. And I was hooked.
Now years later I know what was always true. I am an artist. And I am a painter.
Since then I have created 15 collections of fabric, art for wall paper, home decor, wall art, and much more.
The Curated Maximalist Style has become part of who I am and what I do.
