Search Results

(b Kabul, June 5, 1973).

Afghan video and performance artist and photographer, active also in the USA. After fleeing Soviet-occupied Kabul with her family in the late 1980s, Abdul lived as a refugee in Germany and India before moving to Southern California. She received a BA in Political Science and Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, and an MFA at the University of California, Irvine, in 2000. Abdul first returned to a post-Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, where she encountered a place and people transformed by decades of violence and unrest. Since that time, Abdul has made work in Kabul and Los Angeles, staging herself in performances and creating performance-based video works and photography that explore ideas of home and the interconnection between architecture and identity.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Abdul made emotionally intense performance art informed by that of Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramović and Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta. At the time unable to travel to Afghanistan, Abdul created and documented performances in Los Angeles that probed her position as Afghan, female, Muslim, a refugee and a transnational artist. In ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 28 August 1952, in Richmond Heights (Missouri).

Installation artist, video artist, photographer.

Kim Abeles was an American Field Service student in 1969 in Utsunomiya, Japan, where a Buddhist priest introduced her to traditional Japanese arts. She returned to the USA and studied painting at Ohio University, receiving a BFA in ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 15 November 1948, in Des Moines (Iowa).

Environmental artist, video artist, installation artist.

Dennis Adams lives and works in New York and Berlin. Adams' work focuses on the relationship between architecture and images taken from political literature. He creates architectural environments that act as frameworks for text, photographs and other images. These environments, which are either temporary or permanent, are public places. The series of ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 3 August 1955, in Bristol (Pennsylvania).

Painter, sculptor, video artist, installation artist.

Lisa Adams studied at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1976; Scripps College, Claremont, California, obtaining a BA in 1977; and Claremont Graduate University, receiving an MFA in ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1954, in Pittsburgh.

Video artist, film maker.

Peggy Ahwesh learned her craft by working with the horror director George Romero and as a film programmer at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Inc. She was assistant professor of Film and Electronic Media at Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, Bard College (...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1968, in Redondo Beach (California).

Installation artist, photographer, film maker. Multimedia.

Doug Aitken is a graduate of the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. He started as art director for Fatboy Slim, Iggy Pop and Barenaked Ladies' video clips. He operates from New York and Los Angeles. His installation ...

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 ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Installation artist, video artist, photographer, sculptor, film maker. Multimedia.

Beth B. attended art school as a child. She studied at University of California, Irvine, and at San Diego State University, and obtained a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She took her initial as a surname from 'B-Movies', the film company she founded in New York City in the late 1970s. Beth B. has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the New York State Council on the Arts. She is co-founder of the artists' group Collaborative Projects Inc. She lives in New York City....

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in New York and Berlin.

Born 1949, in Columbus (Ohio).

Installation artist, sculptor, mixed media, video artist. Multimedia.

Judith Barry studied finance, architecture and art at the University of Florida, graduating in 1972. She received an MA in Communication Arts from New York Institute of Technology in ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1972.

Installation artist, video artist.

Julie Becker creates architectural interiors, such as Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest of 1996. These models, which look like tiny cells, contain the possessions (such as furniture and diaries) of the various occupants (for example, the son of the psychopathic killer in Stanley Kubrick's film ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 29 October 1946, in New York.

Video artist, installation artist.

Dara Birnbaum studied at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, receiving a degree in architecture in 1969. She also obtained a degree in 1972 from the San Francisco Art Institute, and studied at the New School of Social Residence in New York in ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1950, in Brook Alexander, New York.

Installation artist, video artist, poet.

David Bunn graduated with a master's degree from the University of California at Los Angeles and has received several awards and fellowships including two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowships, the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship and the Ethel Fortner Award for creative writing....

American, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1973, in Hong Kong.

Video artist, multi-media artist, activist, and publisher. Artists’ books

Paul Chan spent his early childhood in Hong Kong but immigrated to Omaha, Nebraska, in his youth. He began his BFA in video and digital arts at the Art Institute of Chicago in ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in Canada.

Born 1947, in Virginia.

Video artist, photographer, installation artist.

Donigan Cumming studied at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and at Concordia University in Montreal. He lives and works in Montreal.

Through his video, multi-media and photography work, Cumming challenges preconceptions dictating appropriate and inappropriate subject matter. His unabashed depictions of people living on the margins of society react against 'concerned' representation with biting realism. In ...

(b Toronto, 1958).

Canadian photographer, video artist, and writer, active in USA. Davey variously studied design, drawing, and painting at Montreal’s Concordia University, finally settling on photography, in which she received a BFA in 1982. She later earned an MFA at the University of California San Diego, and began post-graduate studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1988. Frustrated by the tendencies of such contemporaries as Andreas Gursky and Gregory Crewdson to, as she put it, ‘overproduce, overenlarge, overconsume’, Davey sought rather to draw on ‘the inherently surrealist, contingent, “found” quality of the vernacular photograph’(Davey 2014).

Davey’s photographs and videos consist predominantly of quiet vignettes from everyday life: homes filled with dusty, over-stuffed shelves, crammed with books, albums, bottles, and art supplies, and tables with momentary arrangements of these objects in use; lovingly rendered still-lifes of the near extinct, ad-hoc displays of button vendors, newsstands, and hi-fi equipment; always suggesting but rarely depicting the acquisitive, inquisitive people living and working in these humble, very much lived-in spaces. Her breakthrough ...

American, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 5 September 1933, in Oak Park, Illinois.

Photographer, filmmaker. Portraits.

At age ten Bruce Davidson created a darkroom in his childhood home in Oak Park, Illinois, and as a teenager he began working in a camera shop. Interested in pursuing photography, he attended the Rochester Institute of Technology. After graduation he worked briefly shooting products for Eastman Kodak before starting graduate school in ...

(b Boston, MA, 1966).

American photographer and installation artist. Deschenes studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, where she was awarded a BFA in photography in 1988. Beginning in the 1990s, she exhibited widely across various continents. With a focus on materiality and site-specificity, her work examines light, perception, architecture, and photography. Yet often she worked without a camera, adopting a post-conceptual and post-minimal stance that walks a fine line between abstraction and representation. Instead of making straightforward photographs that depict a given past event or a vision of the world, Deschenes posed real-time questions about the philosophical potentials of the medium, stripping its apparatus bare while pushing at its traditional definitions and emphasizing the constantly changing nature of photography. For her Green Screen series (2001), Deschenes took a green screen—typically used as a special effects tool in film-making and television—as her subject, photographing and scanning these large-scale monochrome backdrops. In her ...

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 – 21st century, female.

Born 1962, in New Haven (Connecticut).

Painter (mixed media), video artist.

Cheryl Donegan took part in the FIAC (Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain - International Contemporary Art Fair) in Paris in 1994, and the Lyons Biennale in 1995. She shows her works in solo exhibitions in Paris, and in ...

(b Vancouver, 1960).

Canadian photographer and film maker, lives and works in Vancouver. After studying at the Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver (1979–82), he began making films and videos that reflect on issues of culture and technology and on the relationship between popular representations of history and subjectivity. In 1988 long-term research culminated in an essay and exhibition that gathered together Samuel Beckett’s eight works for film and television. Samuel Beckett: Teleplays, which toured Canada, America and Europe for four years, touches on themes of alienation, displacement and the collapse of subjectivity that Douglas explores in his film and video installations. For his slide installation Onomatopoeia, (1985–6), lasting six minutes in each rotation, Douglas projected 154 black-and-white images of an empty textile factory on to a screen hanging over an 88-noteplayer-piano that played bars from Beethoven’s C Minor Sonata, Opus 11; the selected refrain sounded uncannily like a ragtime piece. By isolating this phenomenon Douglas pointed to the difficulties of interpreting history from an unbiased perspective. The questioning of habit and criticism of popular contemporary media was continued in ...