American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 5 June 1947, in Chicago.
Installation artist, performance artist, photographer, musician.
Computer Art (Multimedia Art).
Laurie Anderson graduated in art history at Barnard College in 1969, and obtained a second degree of Fine Arts in sculpture from Columbia University in ...
(b Nairobi, 1958).
Kenyan photographer, multimedia and performance artist, and teacher of Indian descent, active in the USA. DeSouza was born in Kenya to Indian parents. Raised in London from the age of 7, he called his background that of a ‘double colonial history’. DeSouza attended Goldsmiths College in London and the Bath Academy of Art, and although he has worked primarily in photography and as a writer on contemporary art, he has also branched out into performance art, digital painting, and textual and mixed media arts. He moved to the USA in 1992 and in 2012 became of Head of Photography at the University of California, Berkeley.
The primary themes in deSouza’s work are those of colonial encounter, seen in Indigena/Assimilado (1998), a photographic series of migrant workers in Los Angeles; migration, as explored in Threshold (1996–8), his early photographic series of airports empty of people; exile, which he explored in ...
American, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 27 September 1965, in Billings (Montana).
Installation artist, performance artist, video artist, writer. Multimedia.
Andrea Fraser studied at the School for Visual Arts (1982(1983) and at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York (...
American, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 18 June 1960, in New York City.
Performance artist, writer, art historian, curator. Multimedia, video, film, Internet art. Multiculturalism, feminism.
Coco Fusco studied semiotics at Brown University (1982) and received a MA in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (...
American, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 1956, in Lima (Ohio).
Performance artist, installation artist, photographer, video artist. Multimedia.
Ann Hamilton studied at the University of Kansas, and at Yale (geology, sculpture and textiles). She lives and works in Columbus, Ohio. A multimedia artist, her earliest shows featured numerous performance works in complex, often vast environments. Her installations are conceived as 'temporal intersections', incorporating the cultural history, geography and socio-economic characteristics of a particular site. Her work engages every area of the human experience, based on the principle that an object should 'take physical possession' of the viewer, before an attempt is made to name it (and hence to 'pin it down'). Each installation implicates a specific sensory environment and highly personal gestures. In ...
American, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 1941, in Cleveland (Ohio).
Photographer, video artist, digital artist, performance artist.
Lynn Hershman studied at the Case Western Reserve University, graduating with a BA in Education, Museum Administration and Fine Arts in 1963. In 1972 she obtained a Master's degree in Fine Art from San Francisco State University. In the 1970s Hershman created a series of pseudonyms, including the art critics invented for her Master's dissertation, ...
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 6 August 1945, in Salt Lake City.
Sculptor, draughtsman, performance artist, installation artist, photographer. Multimedia.
Paul McCarthy received a BFA in 1969 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in film at the University of Southern California in ...
(b Fort Wayne, IN, Dec 6, 1941).
American conceptual artist. Recognized as one of the most influential, innovative, and provocative 20th century American artists, Nauman extended the media of sculpture, film, video, photography, and sound with performance and spatial explorations. Nauman attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1960 to 1964, with early studies in mathematics and physics, which broadened to the study of art under Italo Scanga (1932–2001). He received a master’s degree in Fine Art from the University of California, Davis in 1966 under William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, Frank Owen (b 1939), and Stephen Kaltenbach (b 1940) and honorary degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (1989) and California Institute of Art (2000). In 1966 he began to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Nauman’s interactive artworks and performances explore the syntactical nuances of language, text, and figurative gesture to create material culture and in-between places, which often result in a heightened sense of physical and emotional awareness. Nauman’s artistic explorations of spatial perception, bodily consciousness, physical and mental activity, and linguistic manipulation were demonstrated in interactive spatial compositions that accentuated various relationships between the human body and built environments. Early works included body castings and holographic self-images with subsequent works situating the viewer within their own mental and bodily perceptions. In ...
American, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active in New York.
Born 1959, in Honolulu.
Sound installation artist, photographer.
Kristin Oppenheim trained at the San Francisco State University from 1981 to 1984, and gained an MFA from Hunter College in New York in 1989. Although she has gained recognition for her photographic work - several of her portraits of children were shown both in the ...
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in Belgium.
Born 1947, in Brooklyn (New York City).
Painter, sculptor, performance artist, video artist, assemblage artist, musician.
Charlemagne Palestine lives and works in Brussels. He is a multimedia artist who experiments with all forms of art: painting, sculpture, music, video and performance....
American, 20th–21st century, female.
Born 12 October 1939, in Fox Chase (Pennsylvania).
Performance artist, assemblage artist, installation artist, video artist. Multimedia.
Neo-Dadaism, Feminist Art, Body Art.
Carolee Schneemann received a BA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, and an MFA from the University of Illinois. She also studied at Columbia University School of Painting and Sculpture, New York; the New School for Social Research; and Universidad de Puebla, Mexico. She has taught at the University of Illinois (...
(b Prague, 1955).
Czech sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist active in Montreal, Canada. Moving to the West in her teenage years, she attended several Canadian universities before completing her MFA at the University of Toronto in 1982. Working in a variety of media, yet almost always engaging in a dialogue between the body and its environment, she is best known for her wearable sculptures not unlike those of Rebecca Horn. Her early work Measuring Tape Cone (1979; see 1995 exh. cat., p. 50) is a photograph that shows a tightly wound measuring tape covering the artist’s hand and extending into a cone. It is an early instance of her interest in creating objects that interact with the body, offering the possibility of liberation and the threat of containment. These themes are most obviously expressed in Jacket (1992; see 1995 exh. cat., p. 136), a garment in which the arms are sewn together. ...
Culture of images and visuality that creates meaning in our world today. This includes media forms such as photography, film, television, and digital media; art media such as painting, drawing, prints, and installations; architecture and design; comic books and graphic novels; fashion design, and other visual forms including the look of urban life itself. It also encompasses such social realms as art, news, popular culture, advertising and consumerism, politics, law, religion, and science and medicine. The term visual culture also refers to the interdisciplinary academic field of study that aims to study and understand the role that images and visuality play in our society; how images, gazes, and looks make meaning socially, culturally, and politically; how images are integrated with other media; and how visuality shapes power, meaning, and identity in contemporary global culture.
The emergence of the concept of visual culture as a means to think about the role of images in culture and as an academic field of study is a relatively recent phenomenon, emerging in the late 1980s and becoming established by the late 1990s. There were numerous factors that contributed to the idea that images should be understood and analysed across social arenas rather than as separate categories, including the impact of digital media on the circulation of images across social realms, the modern use of images from other social arenas (such as news and advertising) in art, and the cross-referencing of cultural forms displayed in popular culture and art. It was also influenced by the increasingly visible role played by images in political conflict and a general trend toward interdisciplinarity in academia....
