Ann Hamilton is one of the earliest artists to work at the iea. Over the years she has returned many times producing a monumental body of printed works. She is a visual artist internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labor. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton’s art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination.
Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956, Ann Hamilton received a BFA in Textile Design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hamilton has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University since 2001, where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art.
Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal, the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world. Her major commissions include projects for Waterfront Seattle; Park Avenue Armory (2013); The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2010); The Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2006); La Maison Rouge Fondation de Antoine Galbert, Paris, France (2005); Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2003); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2003, 1991); The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); The Musee d’art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988).
Hamilton created phora using a miniature video camera in close proximity to the faces of small painted medieval altarpiece sculptures at Stockholm’s Museum of National Antiquities.
Ann Hamilton’s Phora series Exhibited in 798 Gallery District Beijing, China.
phora
Suite of 12 Iris prints on Arches watercolor paper
Edition of 10 + 5 Artist Proofs
Copublished in 2000 by the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred, NY and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
Image size: 24 x 24 inches, Paper size: 47 x 34 inches
Photo credit: Ann Hamilton
The Reflection series was the third group of prints made by Hamilton at the iea. These images mark the occasion Hamilton’s installation myein at The United States Pavilion 48th Venice Biennale 1999. The images are reflections of the artist on multiple layers of glass that were stacked in preparation for the construction of a gridded wall that would cross the entire facade of the United States Pavilion in Venice. Photographed at five minute intervals, the series documents the shifting weather as seen through the recently uncovered pavilion skylights.
reflection
Suite of 12 Iris prints on Arches watercolor paper
Edition of 10 + 5 Artist Proofs
Copublished in 2000 by the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred, NY and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
Image size: 24 x 24 inches, Paper size: 47 x 34 inches
Photo credit: Ann Hamilton
RESOURCES:
annhamiltonstudio.com/biography.html