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Article

Anderson, Akili Ron  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 19 February 1946, in Washington DC.

Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, engraver, photographer, video artist, glassmaker, decorative designer. Theatre design.

AfriCobra Group.

Akili Ron Anderson attended the Corcoran School of Art and Howard University in Washington DC where he lives and works. He is a member of AfriCobra (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) founded in ...

Article

Arcangel, Cory  

Christiane Paul

(b Buffalo, NY, May 25, 1978).

American computer artist, performance artist, video artist, installation artist, composer, sculptor, and printmaker. He graduated in 2000 from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he originally studied classical guitar but later switched to the technology of music. At Oberlin he also met Paul B. Davis with whom he formed the Beige Programming Ensemble in 2000, and released a record of 8-bit music entitled The 8-Bit Construction Set. In 2010 he co-founded, with Howie Chen and Alan Licht, the band Title TK.

Arcangel’s body of work has consistently addressed a series of themes, such as the manner in which we express ourselves through technological tools and platforms (from Photoshop to YouTube) in funny, original, creative, and awkward ways. His projects often explore our fascination with technology by playfully undermining our expectations of it and limiting viewers’ control. Another theme that frequently surfaces is the speed of technological obsolescence and the absurdity of a given technology’s lifecycle, which often moves from the cutting-edge of design to an insult of good taste (see Siegel, pp. 81–2). Arcangel connects these themes to the history of art, drawing parallels between pop-cultural vernacular and approaches in the fine art world and combining high tech and do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches. Among his best-known works are his hacks and modifications of Nintendo game cartridges and obsolete computer systems from the 1970s and 1980s (...

Article

Auerbach, Tauba  

American, 21st century, female.

Born 1981, in San Francisco.

Painter, sculptor, printmaker, musician. Artists’ books.

After graduating from Stanford University in 2003, Tauba Auerbach worked as a sign painter in San Francisco, an influence reflected in many of her early works. This interest in the visual aspects of language and text manifested itself in an important series of calligraphic drawings and artists’ books. Her most notable body of work may be the ‘fold’ paintings, in which canvas supports are physically folded and creased, then spread out and spray painted from various angles, and with multiple colours; the canvases are then stretched totally flat, so that fold patterns exist only as painted remnants of the surfaces’ former topography. She has further explored the boundaries and visual relationships between two- and three-dimensionality in her group of pop-up books, and in a number of books made by photographing cross-sections of a solid surface, such as a block of marble or wood, as it is gradually sanded down....

Article

Bottinelli, Wolf Adam  

German, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1950.

Painter, lithographer, performance artist, photographer. Artists' books.

Fluxus.

Wolf Adam Bottinelli trained at the art academy in Kassel. He appears to have a very free idea of the act of creation, which has brought him close to the ...

Article

Cassel, Axel  

German, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in France.

Born 1955, in Germany.

Painter, sculptor, engraver, illustrator, performance artist.

Alex Cassel arrived in the south of France with his family in 1970, and moved to Paris in 1972. He embarked on a course in law and economics, but in ...

Article

Childish, Billy  

Francis Summers

(b Chatham, Kent, Dec 1, 1959).

English painter, poet, printmaker and musician. He studied for a short time at St Martin’s School of Art (1980–81) before being expelled. He was famously Tracey Emin’s partner before she achieved fame as a ‘Young British Artist’, his name featuring prominently on her infamous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 (1995; London, Saatchi Gal.) Indeed, their work shares a simplicity of execution and confessional frankness that links them beyond the divide Childish placed between them. A prodigiously prolific artist, he produced reams of self-published poetry, released many albums (through nine groups including Thee Headcoats), wrote novels and created a vast number of paintings. He clung to his outsider status, however, decrying what he saw as the egotism and commercialism of the London Art scene. His style of painting and printmaking was greatly indebted to German Expressionism, specifically to the work of Emil Nolde. Following the example of early 20th-century artists, Childish also published manifestoes, including the Stuckist manifesto of ...

Article

Cohen, Steven  

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Active in France.

Born 11 August 1962, in Johannesburg.

Printmaker, choreographer, performance artist. Identity politics.

Living Art.

Steven Cohen was the first South African artist under apartheid to create confrontational performance art engaging with sexual and cultural identity. He began his career in the 1980s, while conscripted into the South African army, when he went absent without leave and learnt how to screenprint at Cape Town’s Ruth Prowse School of Art....

Article

Delprat, Hélène  

French, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1957, in Amiens.

Painter, engraver (wood/lino). Stage sets, stage costumes.

Hélène Delprat studied at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts in Amiens and Paris. Between 1982 and 1984, she was an artist-in-residence at the Académie de France in Rome. She won the Prix de Rome in ...

Article

Ģelzis, Kristaps  

Latvian, 20th century, male.

Born 24 October 1962, in Riga, Latvian SSR (now Latvia).

Painter, graphic artist, multimedia artist. Allegorical subjects, abstraction and portraiture. Sculptural objects, conceptual installations.

Of the generation that came of age during Latvia’s transition from Soviet occupation to political independence, Kristaps Ģelzis distinguished himself as the most cerebral of that nation’s artists while, paradoxically, anchoring his work in intrinsic properties of base materials, the timelessness of simple forms, and labour-intensive craft. The son and younger brother of renowned architects, Ģelzis resolved to pursue another creative vocation, first studying violin while attending Riga’s 50th Secondary School, then taking preparatory classes for the Latvian Art Academy in lieu of attending the art high school. As a student in the academy’s department of graphic art ...

Article

Gygi, Fabrice  

Swiss, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1965, in Geneva.

Installation artist, performance artist, draughtsman, engraver.

Gygi lives and works in Zurich and Geneva. He attended the École des Arts Décoratifs, Geneva, and later the École Supérieure d'Art Visuel, Geneva. In his installations and other artworks, Gygi scrutinizes the hierarchy of society. He highlights divergent, symbolic functions and conflicting relationships; the same place, the same action being both protective and authoritarian. Thus, he denounces the latent racism of his contemporaries with the installation ...

Article

Heap of Birds, Edgar  

Native American (Cheyenne and Arapaho), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 22 November, 1954, in Wichita (Kansas).

Painter, draughtsman, sculptor, printmaker, installation artist, conceptual artist, educator.

Edgar Heap of Birds is one of the most distinguished North American indigenous artists of his generation. His works reveal a distinctly critical and historical awareness of the ways that American Indian peoples, their histories and their viewpoints have been ignored and written over under colonialism. He has received numerous honours, presenting his work in competition for the United States Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (...

Article

Knowles, Alison  

Midori Yoshimoto

(b New York, NY, 1933).

American printmaker, sound artist and performance artist. She was one of the founding members of Fluxus, the international avant-garde collective formed in 1962. Transferring from Middlebury College to Pratt Institute in New York, Knowles studied painting and drawing with Adolph Gottlieb and Richard Lindner and graduated in 1956. By the late 1950s she had lost interest in painting and burnt all her early paintings in a bonfire. It was then that she befriended artists Dick Higgins (1938–98), George Brecht and composer John Cage whose meditation on everyday life and music of indeterminacy inspired her to pursue a new artistic path.

After marrying in 1960, Knowles and Higgins were invited by George Maciunas to perform in the Fluxus inaugural concert series in Europe. There Knowles started to write her “Propositions,” radical reinterpretation of Cagean text scores, which transferred the artistic agency to the audience. Among her early events, Make a Salad...

Article

Krystufek, Elke  

Austrian, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in Rotterdam and Vienna.

Born 1970, in Vienna.

Painter, draughtswoman, engraver, video artist, performance artist, installation artist, photographer, mixed media. Artists' books.

Elke Krystufek paints her own body, produces self-portraits and writes her thoughts across her works; a woman's life constantly historiated and revisited. Her work is a feminist claim that also illustrates the increasingly artificial boundary between private and public life today and the logical consequences of this: the representation of our emotions, 'déjà-vu' replacing the true 'ego' that the artist is actually trying to reach. Though she accepts an affinity with the Expressionist Egon Schiele, she does not recognise any association with Viennese Actionism. Among her performances, mention may be made of the following: ...

Article

Kushner, Robert  

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 19 August 1949, in Pasadena.

Painter (including gouache), collage artist, draughtsman, performance artist, lithographer. Stage sets, stage costumes.

Robert Kushner studied at the University of California, San Diego, where he received a BA. In 1971 he travelled in Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, Europe and India with Amy Goldin. He lives and works in New York. His early work in the 1970s was performance art in which his costumes (or lack of them) were as important as the performance. He was a founder of the Pattern and Decorative movement of the 1970s, and his numerous decorative works are inspired by Matisse. He views his work as a continuation and update of a vast conservative tradition, and believes in the importance of beauty in everyday life....

Article

LaPena, Frank  

G. Lola Worthington

(b San Francisco, CA, Oct 5, 1937).

Native American (Maidu–Wintu) painter, printmaker, photographer, writer, educator, traditional dancer and poet. LaPena, also known as Tauhindauli, spent time with the Nomtipom Wintu and other regional neighboring elders to conserve and regain traditional cultural practices. He was taught traditional tribal songs, dances and ceremonial rituals of Northern California Native American culture that inspired his interest in reviving and preserving Northern California tribal culture and accompanying performance arts. His work, along with Frank Day (1902–76), a late Maidu elder and painter, aided the founding of the Maidu Dancers and Traditionalists, a group dedicated to carrying out traditional cultural forms and social practices. Earning his bachelor’s degree from California State University (CSU), Chico (1965), and an Anthropology Masters of Arts degree from CSU, Sacramento (1978), he taught for the next 30 years in the CSU, Sacramento American Indian Studies program.

For LaPena, his art was a spiritual act, which empowers the maker with an opportunity to achieve a stronger sense of understanding life. Inspired by prehistoric rock painting, some painted images are depicted in total abstraction, while others illustrate a narrative theme. His strong consciousness of his Californian Native American heritage is distinctive and many themes in his compositions provide a powerful commentary in their depiction of the struggles of Northern California Native Americans; “To let the world know what happened in California, and to the indigenous populations points out that survival issues are still of great concern.” His paintings and prints reached a popular acceptance. LaPena exhibited throughout the United States and internationally at the Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, NM, the Chicago Art Institute, the San Francisco Museum, the Linder Museum, Stuttgart, the American Arts Gallery, New York, the George G. Heye Center of the Smithsonian, New York, and numerous galleries. In ...

Article

Lapena, Frank  

Native American (Wintu-Nomtipom/Tenai), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 5 October 1937, in San Francisco.

Artist, poet, writer, traditional dancer.

Frank LaPena, of the Wintu-Nomtipom/Tenai of Northern California, is a key figure, along with a number of other important Native artists working in California during the 1970s, in what has been termed a ‘Renaissance’ in California Indian arts. Many of LaPena’s artworks engage directly with his awareness of California Indian experience and memory. He has used Mount Shasta significantly as a source of inspiration. As was usual for his generation, he attended a federal Indian boarding school (in Stewart, Nevada) and experienced its harsh assimilationist doctrines. He began to be interested in the arts during high school and this developed further during his undergraduate years at California State University, Chico. Later earning a teaching credential at San Francisco State University and a Masters of Arts degree at CSU, Sacramento, he would eventually teach at the latter as Professor of Art and Ethnic Studies. He has said that he learnt more from his California Indian elders than anything presented to him in the state education system. Now retired, he continues to hold leadership roles in the arts both locally and nationally....

Article

Makarevich, Igor  

Russian, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 8 August 1943, in Tripoli, USSR (now Republic of Georgia)

Photographer, painter, sculptor, printmaker, installation artist.

Soviet Nonconformist Art; Moscow Conceptualism.

Collective Actions (group).

Igor Makarevich grew up Tbilisi, Georgia before moving to Moscow in 1951. From 1955 to 1962...

Article

Museum of Modern Art  

Deborah Cullen

[MoMA](New York)

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in 1929 by patrons Lillie P(lummer) Bliss, Cornelius J. Sullivan and Rockefeller, John D(avison), jr. to establish an institution devoted to modern art. Over the next ten years the Museum moved three times and in 1939 settled in the Early Modern style building (1938–9) designed by Philip S. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone that it still occupies at 11 West 53 Street. Subsequent renovations and expansions occurred in the 1950s and 1960s by Philip Johnson, in 1984 by Cesar Pelli and in 2002–4 by Yoshirō Taniguchi (b 1937). MoMA QNS, the temporary headquarters during this project, was subsequently used to provide art storage. In 2000, MoMA and the contemporary art space, P.S.1, Long Island City, Queens, announced their affiliation. Recent projects are shown at P.S.1 in Queens in a renovated public school building.

According to founding director, Alfred H(amilton) Barr...

Article

Niro, Shelley  

Native American (Bay of Quinte Mohawk), 21st century, female.

Born 1954, in Niagara Falls (New York).

Photographer, filmmaker, painter, sculptor, printmaker, screenwriter, beadworker.

The Mohawk artist Shelley Niro, born in the United States and raised at the Six Nations Grand River Reserve in Ontario, Canada, is a member of the Turtle Clan. She received a BA from Ontario College of Art and Design (...

Article

Poitras, Edward  

Native American (Gordon First Nation), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1953, in Regina (Saskatchewan).

Sculptor, painter, draughtsman, installation artist, performance artist.

A highly regarded figure in the field of First Nations/Native American contemporary art in Canada, Edward Poitras was the first indigenous artist to gain the distinction of representing his country at the Venice Biennale in ...