Aliza Nisenbaum (born 1977 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican painter living and working in New York, NY. She is best known for her colorful paintings of Mexican and Central American immigrants. [1] She is a professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts. [2]
Nisenbaum holds a BFA and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nisenbaum's paintings consist of still lives, figures in interiors, and portraits. In 2012, Nisenbaum worked with artist Tania Bruguera on her ongoing project Immigrant Movement International in Queens, New York. The community-based project creates a space where immigrants can engage with contemporary art in an empowering way. [3] Nisenbaum taught English to Mexican and Central American immigrants as part of the project, and also painted their portraits. Nisenbaum has since also become known for her group portraits. [4] When on a residency at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, she painted group portraits of guards employed at the museum, which were then displayed in the exhibition A Place We Share. [5] In 2015, after receiving a fellowship from the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs in New York City, Nisenbaum painted a group portrait of fifteen women who worked at the agency. The work is said to pay homage to Sylvia Sleigh's group portrait of A.I.R. Gallery members. [6] Nisenbaum recently completed a residency in the London Underground as part of a UK public commission to paint portraits of members of the Transport for London staff. [7] The resulting large-scale group portrait is displayed in London's Brixton Station. [8] Nisenbaum has said that she is influenced by Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, and writer Amy Sherlock has suggested that Nisenbaum's work is a form of social practice. [9]
Nisenbaum has had solo exhibitions at White Columns, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Mary Mary Gallery in Glasgow, Illinois State University, and the Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago, among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Flag Art Foundation, Anton Kern Gallery, and the Norwich Castle Museum. Nisenbaum was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial [10] and the 2023 Gwangju Biennale. [11] She is represented by the Anton Kern Gallery in New York City [12] and the Mary Mary Gallery in Scotland. [13]
Nisenbaum was selected to be a part of the Institute of Contemporary Art's "When Home Won't Let You Stay: Migration Through Contemporary Art." The exhibition lasted from October 23, 2019 – January 26, 2019 and consisted of a diverse range of media. Nisenbaum's contribution was a series of paintings, the largest of which was figures in an interior, titled "La Talaverita, Sunday Morning NY Times." It depicts two individuals named Veronica and Gustavo splayed out on a couch reading the New York Times. The painting is named for the patterned tiles in the Talavera style that provide much of the background. Nisenbaum is interested in power through representation and the politics of visibility.
Nisenbaum's work has been discussed in ArtForum, [14] the Brooklyn Rail, [15] Hyperallergic, [16] the New York Times, [17] and Vogue, [18] among other publications. She has received awards from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program, and the NYC Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. [19] Nisenbaum's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Norwich Castle Museum, the Irish Arts Council, and the Kadist Art Foundation. [20]
Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s.
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an American multimedia artist and filmmaker. Her work with technology and in media-based practices is credited with helping to legitimize digital art forms. Her interests include feminism, race, surveillance, and artificial intelligence and identity theft through algorithms and data tracking.
Kim Dingle is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist working across painting, sculpture, photography, found imagery, and installation. Her practice explores themes of American culture, history, and gender politics through both figurative and abstract approaches.
Lisa Sigal is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Tania Bruguera is a Cuban artist and activist who focuses on installation and performance art. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she works as head of media and performance at Harvard University. Bruguera has participated in numerous international exhibitions. her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.
Carmen Herrera was a Cuban-born American abstract, minimalist visual artist and painter. She was born in Havana and lived in New York City from the mid-1950s. Herrera's abstract works brought her international recognition late in life.
Collier Schorr is an American artist and fashion photographer best known for adolescent portraits that blend photographic realism with elements of fiction and youthful fantasy.
Toyin Ojih Odutola is a Nigerian-American contemporary visual artist known for her vivid multimedia drawings and works on paper. Her unique style of complex mark-making and lavish compositions rethink the category and traditions of portraiture and storytelling. Ojih Odutola's artwork often investigates a variety of themes from socio-economic inequality, the legacy of colonialism, queer and gender theory, notions of blackness as a visual and social symbol, as well as experiences of migration and dislocation.
Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
Mary Corse is an American artist who lives and works in Topanga, California. Fascinated with perceptual phenomena and the idea that light itself can serve as both subject and material in art, Corse's practice can be seen as existing at a crossroads between American Abstract Expressionism and American Minimalism. She is often associated with the male-dominated Light and Space art movement of the 1960s, although her role has only been fully recognized in recent years. She is best known for her experimentation with radiant surfaces in minimalist painting, incorporating materials that reflect light such as glass microspheres. Corse initially attended University of California, Santa Barbara starting in 1963. She later moved on to study at Chouinard Art Institute, earning her B.F.A. in 1968.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is an American contemporary visual artist. She is known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is a professor at Williams College.
Liz Magic Laser is an American visual artist working primarily in video and performance. She is based art in Brooklyn, New York.
Meriem Bennani is a Moroccan artist currently based in New York City.
Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
Jordan Casteel is an American figurative painter. She typically paints portraits of friends and family members as well as neighbors and strangers in Harlem and New York. Casteel lives and works in New York City.
Alexandra Bell is an American multidisciplinary artist. She is best known for her series Counternarratives, large scale paste-ups of New York Times articles edited to challenge the presumption of "objectivity" in news media. Using marginalia, annotation, redaction, and revisions to layout and images, Bell exposes racial and gender biases embedded in print news media.
Summer Wheat is a contemporary American artist born in 1977 in Oklahoma City. She currently lives in Queens, NY and works in Brooklyn, NY.
William Cordova is a contemporary cultural practitioner and interdisciplinary artist currently residing between Lima, Peru; North Miami Beach, Florida; and New York.
Guadalupe Rosales is an American artist and educator. She is best known for her archival projects, “Veteranas and Rucas” and “Map Pointz,” found on social media. The archives focus on Latino backyard party scenes and underground party crew subculture in Los Angeles in the late-twentieth century and early-twenty first.