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American, 20th century, male.

Born 24 January 1940, in New York.

Painter, sculptor, performance artist, video artist. Multimedia.

Body Art, Conceptual Art.

Vito Acconci was born in the Bronx, New York and lives and works in Brooklyn. He studied at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts and at the University of Iowa. He has taught in various art schools and universities and in particular at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University and the Parsons School of Design in New York....

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1943, in Los Angeles; died 14 October 2012.

Painter.

Conceptual Art.

Michael Asher studied at the University of California, Irvine, and now lives and works in Los Angeles and in Venice. Like many Conceptual artists, he addresses the issue of how artefacts are presented and viewed, and negates the role of the artist. With his contribution to ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 17 June 1931, in National City (California).

Painter, video artist, photographer. Artist’s books.

Conceptual Art.

John Baldessari lives and works in Santa Monica, California. At the end of the 1950s, he decided to abandon painting and burned his pictures. He has stated that he profoundly disagreed with art in general, and therefore decided to give people what they understood best: written language and photography....

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1936, in New York.

Painter.

Conceptual Art.

Robert Barry was a student of Robert Motherwell at Hunter College until 1963, and began exhibiting in New York in 1964. In his early pictures, Robert Barry introduced the environment: 'I am becoming concerned about the whole situation, instead of simply making a painting', he said. When he exhibited at Bradford College (Massachusetts) in ...

American, 20th century, female.

Born 1941, in Long Beach (California).

Painter (mixed media).

Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, New Image.

Jennifer Bartlett grew up in Long Beach, and the ocean has always been a constant in her work. Her early work is midway between Minimalist and Conceptualist. Starting with a pattern of small dots screenprinted onto a series of identical steel plaques, she painted dotted lines in enamel, the number of dots in each line being calculated on the basis of a strict mathematical scheme. The concept of series was already prominent in this early phase. In the series entitled ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 11 February 1942, in Hamburg (Pennsylvania).

Painter (mixed media).

Conceptual Art.

Bill Beckley began teaching at the New York School of Visual Arts in 1978. In 1979, he began to include painted panels in his photographic work. Later, he took salvaged items that he kept in his studio and worked them into his paintings. He began taking part in group exhibitions in ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1940, in Pittsburgh.

Painter (mixed media), watercolourist, engraver, draughtsman.

Post-Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Copy Art.

Mel Bochner studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and graduated in 1962. He settled in New York in 1964. In New York, Bochner became familiar with other Conceptual artists of that time including Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson. These artists increasingly regarded conventional painting as an obsolete medium and attempted to break free of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Bochner is most well known for paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore measurement, speech, the written word, and scale. In 2005, he received his honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. He currently resides in New York City.

Bochner stood out among the exponents of Conceptual Art in his use of writing systems as a primary material for artistic expression, especially figures or series. There is a similarity between certain works by Bochner and some of those of Polish artist Henryk Berlewi, but whereas Berlewi, in the 1920s, used stencils to repeat geometrical structures in mechanical fashion, Mel Bochner, in the 1960s, drew his geometrical figures by hand, even though they were also based on the repetition of the same element. For several years, Bochner’s interest in the representation of writing and words led him to construct installations. From ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1932, in Detroit; died May 1997, in Cairo.

Installation artist, performance artist, sculptor, draughtsman.

Conceptual Art.

Using a variety of different forms of expression, including installations, writing, performance, photographs and sculpture, James Lee Byars has created a highly personal collection of work. In the 1950s he focused on comparing oriental civilisation and western mystical thought, notably with folding sculptures which he unfolded in public. He went on to subvert objects by creating them in precious or unusual materials such as gold leaf or marble. He made several visits to Japan from ...

American, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1931, in Pittsburgh; died 3 March 2005, in Pittsburgh.

Conceptual artist, mail artist, educator. Artists’ books.

Don Celender earned a BA in fine art from Carnegie Mellon University in 1956 and an art history PhD in 1963 from the University of Pittsburgh. He taught art for 40 years at Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota. In ...

Native American (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1946, in Montana.

Printmaker, photographer, conceptual artist, installation artist.

Corwin Clairmont, or ‘Corky’, received his MFA from California State University, Los Angeles in 1971. His early work, concerning social and environmental issues, earned him a Ford Foundation Grant (...

American, 20th century, female.

Born 1938, in Budapest, Hungary.

Draughtswoman (ink).

Conceptual Art, Environmental Art.

Agnes Denes started out as a painter, but abandoned this in 1968 in favour of what she described as a 'new visual, personal language'. She is one of the originators of Conceptual art, and a pioneer of environmental art, dealing with ecological, cultural and social issues in her work. In her images, geometric structures rigorously elaborated in ink on graph paper, she conceives reality as a structure incapable of being seized in its totality. She delivers a theoretical, mathematical and scientific reflection, a concept 'that dictates the method of representation' inspired by universal history. She has written several theoretical essays....

Vietnamese-American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1968, in Ha Tien, Vietnam.

Photographer, video artist, conceptual artist.

In 1978, Dinh Q. Lê fled Vietnam with his family to the United States, where he eventually gained U.S. citizenship. After completing his BA in fine arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1943, in Fort Worth (Texas).

Painter (mixed media), sculptor of assemblages.

Conceptual Art.

Vernon Fisher studied at Hardin-Simmons University, where he received a BA in 1967, and at the University of Illinois, obtaining an MFA in 1969. He has taught as associate professor of art at Austin College, Sherman (...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1946, in Cleveland (Ohio).

Performance artist, installation artist.

Conceptual Art.

During the 1970s Howard Fried taught at the Sculpture Department of the San Francisco Art Institute where he helped to establish the pioneering New Genres Department.

Fried was instrumental in the development of West Coast Conceptualism. Unlike the very cerebral and intellectual strain of Conceptual art being pioneered in New York and Europe, Californian artists such as Tom Marioni and Paul Kos adopted a more playful tone in their analysis of art-making processes. In his installation, video and performance works, Fried attempted to give form to the psychological dilemma between approach and avoidance that faces the artist before embarking on the creation of an artwork. In ...

American, 20th century.

Born 1944, in Charleston (South Carolina).

Painter. Landscapes.

Gaines lived and worked in Fresno (California). He was a student at the MFA Rochester Institute of Technology. He was first thought of as a conceptual artist, due to his remoteness from painting. Opposed to a romantic artistic vision, he nonetheless returned to painting, with 'scientifically' conceived works. His series ...

Native American (Tlingit and Aleut), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1979, in Sitka (Alaska).

Conceptual artist, performance artist, musician. Installation, video, mixed media.

Nicholas Galanin is a Tlingit and Aleut artist. He received a BA in jewellery design at London Guildhall University (2003), and a MA in Indigenous Visual Arts at Massey University (...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1942, in Urbana (Illinois).

Installation artist, performance artist, sculptor, photographer. Multimedia.

Conceptual Art, Body Art.

Dan Graham lives and works in New York, where he has achieved renown as a gallery owner (he opened the John Daniels Gallery in the 1960s), art theorist (championing Minimal Art) and artist. The closure of his gallery for financial reasons caused Dan Graham to question the economic and social purpose of 'gallery art'. Influenced by Pop Art, which introduced an element of social realism to his work, Graham gradually rejected the concept of artistic autonomy promoted by the American Minimalists. Drawing on his experience of the commercial and economic realities of the art world, he realised that the value of a work of art is above all determined by the extent to which it is reproduced. He began to publicise his own work by reproducing it on inserts in, for example, the art and rock press and women's magazines, rather than by holding exhibitions in commercial galleries. His exploration of art, the means of reproduction and 'mediatisation' continued with the distribution of his own series of photographs of tract-houses (pre-fabricated, mass-produced American suburban homes): ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1946, in Biloxi (Mississippi).

Painter.

Pop Art, Conceptual Art.

Scott Grieger studied at California State University in Northridge and Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He is active on the American west coast. His first paintings were influenced by Pop Art, while later works reflect the growing influence of Conceptual Art. Using symbols borrowed from advertising, packaging, computers, clothing, toys and so on, Grieger subverts corporate and political slogans in order to assert his own counter messages of shared responsibility and ethical living....

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1954, in Wichita (Kansas).

Engraver, screen printer.

Conceptual Art.

Hachivi Edgar's prints are often trenchant denunciations of what he sees as the inherent violence of American society. He was among the American artists invited to exhibit at the Salon de la Jeune Gravure Contemporaine in Paris in ...

American, 20th century, male.

Active also active in Italy.

Born 1943, in Springfield (Illinois).

Assemblage artist, installation artist, performance artist. Multimedia.

Conceptual Art, Identity Art.

David Hammons studied at the Chouinard and Otis Art Institutes in Los Angeles. Hammons' work, notably his series of Body Prints...