Maureen Connor

Last updated

Maureen Connor
Born1947
Baltimore, MD
Nationality American
EducationPratt Institute, 1973, MFA; College of New Rochelle, BA
Known for Installation, Video, Performance
AwardsNew York Foundation for the Arts, Smithsonian Research Fellow, Anonymous Was a Woman, National Endowment for the Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Website www.maureenconnor.net

Maureen Connor (born 1947) is an American artist who creates installations and videos dealing with human resources and social justice. She is known internationally for her work from the 1980s to the present, which focuses on gender and its modes of representation.

Contents

Her work has been shown at MAK, Vienna; Portikus, Frankfurt; ICA, Philadelphia; and the Whitney Biennial among other venues. [1] [2] She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts and Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York. [3] She is Emeritus Professor of Art at Queens College, City University of New York (1990-2014), and a co-founder of Social Practice Queens, an experimental art program sponsored by Queens College and the Queens Museum of Art. [4]

Artwork

Since 2000, Connor has been developing Personnel, a series of interventions concerned with the art institution as a workplace, which explore the attitudes, needs and desires of the staff at various institutions. [5] Personnel and related projects have been produced for a diverse group of venues that include, among others, Periferic 8 Biennial for Contemporary Art, Romania; the Department of Art and Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008; Glyndor Gallery, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY, 2006; Wyspa Art Institute, Gdańsk, Poland, 2004–7; Tapies Foundation, Barcelona, 2003; and the Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2001. [6] [7] She is currently working on an installation of Personnel for the Centre de Recherche en Droit Public, a think tank at the University of Montreal, as well as a book on Personnel to be published jointly by Wyspa Art Institute, Gdańsk, Poland, and Revolver Press, Frankfurt, Germany. [8]

Notable exhibitions

Connor's film, Appetites and Desires, was screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1996. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions in the U.S. at the Queens Museum, New York (2000–01); Alternative Museum, New York (1994-5); Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2006); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1997); and other venues. International solo shows include Contradictions at the Akbank Sanat in Istanbul, Turkey (2012); Evidence, at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, Argentina (1998); Maureen Connor at Galerie Sima in Nuremberg, Germany (1996); and others. [9] Connor has had solo exhibitions at Acquavella Galleries, New York, NY; Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, NY; and PPOW Gallery, New York, NY. [9]

Artworks and films by Connor have been shown in venues across the U.S. and Europe. In 2012, she exhibited It's the Political Economy, Stupid, at the Austrian Cultural Institute in New York, NY. At Alternativa in Gdańsk, Poland, she exhibited Materiality in 2012; at the same venue, in 2011, she showed Labor and Leisure. Also in 2011, Imaginary Archive was presented at Gallery 12 in Galway, Ireland. In 2010, Connor showed The Visible Vagina at David Noland Gallery and Wellington Collaboratorium: Imaginary Archive at Enjoy Gallery in Wellington, New Zealand. Addressing Identities was exhibited at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY in 2009; and Uncle Bob's Variety Show in Off the Wall was exhibited at The Jewish Museum in New York City in 2008. [9] Also in 2008, Connor had videos screened in the Örebro International Video Art Festival, Örebro Lans Museum, Örebro, Sweden. [10]

In 2007, Connor participated in the Disonancifas: Artists Collaborations with Industry, a project in San Sebastian, Spain. Her work Re-Vision appeared at the Edith-Rus Haus für Medienkunst in Oldenburg, Germany, in 2006. Also in 2006, Feeding Desire was presented at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, NY. Prior to that her work was included in Inside Out Loud at the Kemper Art Museum in 2005 and Corpus—Women Artists and Embodiment at the Limerick City Gallery of Art in 2004. [9] Her animation work was shown in Animations, an exhibition held at the Kunst-werke Berlin e.V. in 2003; Banquette at Palau Virrena, Barcelona, Spain, in 2003; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany. Connor's work was included in Mirror, Mirror at Mass MOCA in 2002; Foundation Tapies, Barcelona, in 2002; and the Consejeria de las Artes/Sala Plaza España, Madrid, also in 2002. [11]

In the 1990s, Connor's work was shown widely. [9] It appeared at Zentrum für Kunst und Mediatechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; Paco das Artes (in conjunction with the 1998 São Paulo Biennale), São Paulo, Brazil; Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin, Germany; Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria; The Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and numerous other venues. In 1997, her work was featured in the exhibition, Queens Artists: Highlights of the 20th Century, at the Queens Museum of Art, Flushing Meadow, New York. [12]

Awards and honors

Connor has received numerous honors and awards for her work. She was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2011), and an Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2010). In 2000, she was artist in residence at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts, where she worked on video projects. In the same year, she received a NYSCA Media Project Grant for her work, Personnel, at the Queens Museum of Art and a NYSCA Finishing Funds Award for Growing Older at Queens Museum of Art. In 1999, she received an Individual Artists Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in 1995-96 a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Connor with a fellowship in 1995. [13] During the years of 1991 through 2003, she received several PSC CUNY Grants, from the Research Foundation, of the City University of New York. In 1988, Connor was a visiting artist in residence at the New York Experimental Glass Workshop (now known as UrbanGlass). [4]

Thinner Than You (1990)

In the form of a sculpted dress, this artwork is 60 x 7.5 inches. Connor's thin, twisted dress sends a message about the notion of "skinny". [14] Connor explores the guilt that some women may feel regarding their weight and the culture's view of perfect shape. Thinner Than You is against thinness and makes its questions its positive value. [15] Thinner Than You shows various meanings in relation to the female body represented by Connor's dress sculpture. The empty dress can be interpreted to mean an "empty vessel". [16] [ better source needed ]

Related Research Articles

Joan Jonas American visual artist

Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

Ida Applebroog is an American multi-media artist who is best-known for her paintings and sculptures that explore the themes of gender, sexual identity, violence and politics. Applebroog has been the recipient of multiple honors including the MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant", the College Art Association Distinguished Art Award for Lifetime Achievement, an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, New School for Social Research/Parsons School of Design. Applebroog currently resides in New York City and is represented by Hauser & Wirth.

Audrey Flack American artist

Audrey L. Flack is an American artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, sculpture, and photography.

Hannah Wilke American artist

Hannah Wilke was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, video artist and performance artist. Wilke's work is known for exploring issues of feminism, sexuality and femininity.

Ursula von Rydingsvard American sculptor

Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.

Lesley Dill American artist

Lesley Dill is an American contemporary artist. Her work, using a wide variety of media including sculpture, print, performance art, music, and others, explores the power of language and the mystical nature of the psyche. Dill currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Dorothea Rockburne is an abstract painter, drawing inspiration primarily from her deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Her work is geometric and abstract, seemingly simple but very precise to reflect the mathematical concepts she strives to concretize. "I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio," she has said. "I was visually solving equations." Rockburne's attraction to Mannerism has also influenced her work.

Chakaia Booker American sculptor

Chakaia Booker is an American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces. Booker’s works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Art in 2001. Booker has lived and worked in New York City’s East Village since the early 1980s and maintains a production studio in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Patty Chang is an American performance artist and film director living and working in Los Angeles, California. Originally trained as a painter, Chang received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of California, San Diego. It wasn't until she moved to New York that she became involved with the performance art scene.

Peggy Ahwesh is an American experimental filmmaker and video artist. She received her B.F.A. at Antioch College. A true bricoleur, her tools include narrative and documentary styles, improvised performance and scripted dialogue, sync-sound film, found footage, digital animation, and crude Pixelvision video. Her work is primarily an investigation of cultural identity and the role of the subject in various genres. Her interests include: women, sexuality and feminism; genre; reenactment; artists' books. Her works have been shown worldwide, including in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, London, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Creteil, France. Starting in 1990, she has taught at Bard College as a Professor of Film and Electronic Arts. Her teaching interests include: experimental media, history of the non-fiction film, and women in film.

Judith Shea American sculptor and artist (born 1948)

Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, PA in 1948. She received a degree in Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design in 1969 and a BFA in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works. Her career has three distinct phases: The use of cloth and clothing forms from 1974 to 1981; Hollow cast metal clothng-figure forms from 1982 until 1991; and carved full figure statues made of wood, cloth, clay, foam and hair beginning in 1990 to present.

Leslie Hewitt American artist

Leslie Hewitt is an American contemporary visual artist.

Dee Shapiro is an American artist and writer associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement.

Phyllis Baldino is an American visual artist whose art engages in a conceptual practice that merges performance art, video art, sculpture, and installation in an exploration of human perception. Her single-channel videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix in New York, NY. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Simone Leigh American artist from Chicago (born 1967)

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history.

Jennifer Bolande is an American artist whose work employs various media—primarily photography, sculpture, film and site-specific installations to explore the affinities between particular sets of objects and images and the mercurial meanings they manufacture.

Meg Webster is an American artist from San Francisco working primarily in sculpture and installation art. While her works span multiple media, she is most well known for her artworks that feature natural elements. She is closely affiliated with Post-Minimalism and the Land Art movement and has been exhibiting her work since 1980.

Mary Lum is an American visual artist whose paintings, collages and works on paper reference the urban environment, architectural forms and systems. Critic John Yau writes, "Mary Lum’s paintings on paper are based on collages, which are made from things she uses or encounters in her everyday life as well as photographs she takes of the places she visits. "

Ann Pibal is an American painter who makes geometric compositions using acrylic paint on aluminum panel. The geometric intensity is one of the key characteristics that defines her paintings.

Jane South is a British American artist and educator known for large scale installations, mixed media constructions, and fabric wall pieces.

References

  1. ↑ Levin, Kim (January 28, 1998). "Voice Choices: Maureen Connor, 'Love (at first) Site'". The Village Voice.
  2. ↑ Melrod, George (June 1993). "Lip Schtick (Janine Antoni, Maureen Connor, Rachel Lachowicz)". Art in America.
  3. ↑ John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Maureen Connor". Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved 26 December 2018.
  4. 1 2 Social Practice Queens. "SPQ Faculty and Staff". socialpracticequeens.org. Queens College and the Queens Museum of Art. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  5. ↑ Donovan, Thom. "5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Maureen Connor". Art 21 Magazine. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  6. ↑ Dennis, Donna; Connor, Maureen (Summer 1981). "Environment As Memory: An Interview with Donna Dennis and Maureen Connor". Heresies (11).
  7. ↑ Princenthal, Nancy (April 1995). "Maureen Connor at the Alternative Museum and P.P.O.W.". Art in America.
  8. ↑ "Maureen Connor & Institute for Wishful Thinking". Alternativa. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 Mansfield, Elizabeth C., ed. (2007). Connor, Maureen, (Con)testing Resources, in Making Art History: a Changing Discipline and its Institutions. Routledge. pp. 245–263.
  10. ↑ Jahn, Marisa, ed. (2010). Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices, "Aftermaths and Personnel, A Conversation Between Maureen Connor and Marisa Jahn". YYZ Books.
  11. ↑ Felshin, Nina (Spring 1995). "Women's Work: A Lineage 1966-94". The Art Journal.
  12. ↑ Johnson, Ken (January 19, 2001). "Art in Review: Maureen Connor, Seductions and Games, Queens Museum of Art" . Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  13. ↑ "Maureen Connor". ZKM Center for Art and Media. Retrieved 26 December 2018.
  14. ↑ "5 Questions for Contemporary Practice with Maureen Connor". Art21 Magazine. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
  15. ↑ "Thinner Than You - You are Beautiful..." sites.google.com. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
  16. ↑ "Connor, Maureen - Thinner Than You". dla.library.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2020-12-02.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.