Ann Hamilton was born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956. She earned a BFA in textile design from The University of Kansas, Lawrence, and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. In 1993, Hamilton was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship as well as an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship. She also was the recipient of the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, the College Art Association's Artists Award (both 1992), and had earlier received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. Her public sculpture projects include commissions for The San Francisco Public Library (with Ann Chamberlain), The Allegheny Riverfront Park, Pittsburgh and Teardrop Park, Battery Park City, New York (both with Michael Van Valkenburgh and Michael Mercil). At present, she is working on two recently announced commissions: one for a new Molecular and Cellular Biology Building at The University of Minnesota and the Seattle Central Library, designed by Rem Koolhaas. She is also a professor at The Ohio State University. A performing presence has been part of Ann Hamilton's sculpture practice since her first installation tableau, suitably positioned, 1984, in which she offered herself in a stilled posture, wearing a bristling suit made of painted toothpicks that became her animate skin. She won a Bessie Award, an annual New York theatrical award for Off-Broadway productions, in the creator category for her installation the earth never gets flat, 1987,in which she, ticking metronome in hand, and wearing a suit encrusted in grass seed, sat in a chair mounted high on a paprika-inflected wall. Hamilton has collaborated with dancers, musicians and other performers since 1986, beginning with caught in the middle, working with Susan Hadley, Bradley Sowash, and Bob de Slob. Her 1998 collaboration with Meg Stuart and Stuart's company Damaged Goods, appetite, toured Europe and the U.S. during the 1998-1999 season. Her collaboration with Meredith Monk explores her long-term interest in voice and uttered sound, in particular the structure of call-and-response, and of language and image coming into being. Her most recent works, using a mouth-held pinhole camera, address the very edge of inside and out, just as her room-size installations treat their planar linings as permeable membranes. A visual artist whose multimedia installations have won her wide attention and critical acclaim, Ann Hamilton is known for creating temporal environments that are rich in accumulated materials and innumerable traces of the hand’s mark. She represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal and the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively in North America, Europe, Japan and Australia. Her major museum installations include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (1991); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Musee d'art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); and The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002). Gregory R. Miller & Company is publishing a comprehensive monograph on Hamilton entitled, Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects, that is written by Joan Simon and will be available in the Fall 2006.



Ann Hamilton on "Art 21," PBS

Ann Hamilton at the Guggenheim Museum

Tropos at The Dia Center

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