Park McArthur (born 1984, North Carolina, USA) is a conceptual artist living in New York City who works in sculpture, installation, text, and sound. McArthur is a wheelchair user whose work uses this position to inform her art.
McArthur received her B.A. from Davidson College in 2006. She then graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of Miami in 2009 and studied at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program, 2011–2012. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012.
About McArthur's 2014 exhibition Ramps, wherein the artist exhibited the wheelchair ramps of institutions with which she had previously worked, writer Andrew Blackley said, "The exhibition displayed the means by which institutions both produce and deny access. Each ramp challenged reappraisal and reinforced a set of past and future foreclosures. ‘Ramps’ enlisted generative, generous responses to the negativity of the institution, to the point of engendering the reproduction of those very negative characteristics (by removing the objects’ previously assumed ‘function’). By extension, at stake and always under threat are the threaded relationships between queerness and disability, the breakdown of their concomitant binaries and the temporality of care." [1]
In 2015, McArthur addressed Felix Gonzalez-Torrez's "Untitled" (Love Letter From the War Front) in Whitney Museum of American Art, Lower Manhattan, New York. [2]
McArthur's work has been described as questioning of "care alongside questions of autonomy and dependency" in regards to the daily experience of disabled individuals. [3] McArthur uses her work to challenge the status quo and give those who are usually marginalized by societal structures a voice. Her choice of medium are sculptures and installations that "conceptually driven and often composed of utilitarian materials such as blocks of foam or a Wikipedia entry." [4] Her works elicit an “experience of activism and jerry-built ingenuity.” [5]
In 2022, McArthur was a member of the jury that selected LaToya Ruby Frazier as recipient of the Carnegie Prize. [6]
In 2014, McArthur won the Wynn Newhouse Award, an annual prize given to disabled artists in recognition of their artistic merit.
In 2015, McArthur was an Artadia Awardee. [7]
in 2024, McArthur was awarded a Guggenheium Fellowship in Fine Arts.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a modern and contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. The institution was originally founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named.
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was an American sculptor, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family.
Félix González-Torres or Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban-born American visual artist. He lived and worked primarily in New York City between 1979 and 1995 after attending university in Puerto Rico. González-Torres’s practice incorporates a minimalist visual vocabulary and certain artworks that are composed of everyday materials such as strings of light bulbs, paired wall clocks, stacks of paper, and individually wrapped candies. González-Torres is known for having made significant contributions to the field of conceptual art in the 1980s and 1990s. His practice continues to influence and be influenced by present-day cultural discourses. González-Torres died in Miami in 1996 from AIDS-related illness.
Vija Celmins is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. Her earlier work included pop sculptures and monochromatic representational paintings. Based in New York City, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
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.
Robert Gober is an American sculptor. His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs.
Tara Donovan is an American sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her large-scale installations, sculptures, drawings, and prints utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. Her work has been conceptually linked to an art historical lineage that includes Postminimalism and Process artists such as Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris, along with Light and Space artists such as Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell.
Jim Hodges is a New York-based installation artist. He is known for his mixed-media sculptures and collages that involve delicate artificial flowers, mirrors, chains as spiderwebs, and cut-up jeans.
Joel Elias Shapiro is an American sculptor renowned for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. The artist is classified as a Minimalist as demonstrated in his works, which were mostly defined through the materials used, without allusions to subjects outside of the works. He lives and works in New York City. He is married to the artist Ellen Phelan.
Zoe Strauss is an American photographer and a nominee member of Magnum Photos. She uses Philadelphia as a primary setting and subject for her work. Curator Peter Barberie identifies her as a street photographer, like Walker Evans or Robert Frank, and has said "the woman and man on the street, yearning to be heard, are the basis of her art."
Roni Horn is an American visual artist and writer. The granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, she was born in New York City, where she lives and works. She is currently represented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and Hauser & Wirth. She is openly gay.
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.
Jordan Wolfson is an American visual artist who lives in Los Angeles. He has worked in video and film, in sculptural installation, and in virtual reality.
Mary Miss is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.
LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist.
Rosana Castrillo Diaz is a Spanish artist.
Sue Williams is an American artist born in 1954. She came to prominence in the early 1980s, with works that echoed and argued with the dominant postmodern feminist aesthetic of the time. In the years since, her focus has never waned yet her aesthetic interests have moved toward abstraction along with her subject matter and memories. She lives and works in New York.
Henriette Huldisch is a German-born American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to that, she was the Director of Exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
Eliza Myrie is a visual artist who lives and works in Chicago, IL. Myrie works in a variety of media including sculpture, participatory installation art, public art, and printmaking.
"Untitled" is a work of art by Félix González-Torres, currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, United States. The work is one of the twenty "candy works" in Gonzalez-Torres's oeuvre. The candy works are manifestable; the artworks are not physically permanent, they can exist in more than one place at a time and can vary from one installation to the next in response to the decisions made by the exhibitor, the interactions of audiences, and changing circumstances. This candy work has an ideal weight of 175 pounds (79 kg).