Stephen Lapthisophon | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Website | stephenlapthisophon |
Stephen Lapthisophon (born March 31, 1956) is an American artist, writer, and educator working in the field of conceptual art, critical theory, and disability studies.
Lapthisophon was born in Houston, Texas in 1956. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977 and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. His early work combined poetry, performance, sound art, and visual arts with postmodern philosophical concerns. He is influenced by the legacy of the Situationists, who sought to make everyday life a focus of artistic activity.
Lapthisophon has taught at Columbia College in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and the University of Texas at Dallas. He taught art and art history at The University of Texas at Arlington from 2007-2023.
In 1994, at the age of 39, Lapthisophon suffered a major deterioration of his vision due to optic nerve disease, and became legally blind after intensive medical treatment. [1] His subsequent work as an installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and sound artist has been marked by this experience. Much of his work comments on, and seeks to redress, the over-emphasis on the sense of sight in aesthetic culture.
"I use my own blindness as a figure for the ways we interpret the world through our own specific framing mechanisms. I have also been more and more drawn to create pieces involving a commentary on the sensory world as understood through food, cuisine, cooking, and interaction through food and the art audience. My recent cooking projects have allowed me to speak to all the senses and examine the interaction of our sensory processes." [1]
In Lapthisophon's works, found objects, written texts, and sound recordings are arranged in a way that allows "layers of meanings, allusions and associations...to accumulate" in the mind of the gallery-goer. [2] In his 2000 installation "Defense d'afficher", two large walls were erected in the gallery space and covered with fragments of found media, photos, and texts. One reviewer in Artforum called it an "overload of simultaneously public and personalized cultural shards." [3]
The juxtaposition of fragments of personal, cultural, and social history can be seen in his 2005 book Hotel Terminus. [4] This interest in juxtaposing fragments extends to many of his installations, which frequently contain found objects like old eye charts, posters and graffiti slogans. [5]
Lapthisophon's other work includes sound recordings, site-specific installations, performances, radio broadcasts, books, lectures, and drawings improvised on walls and framed in exhibitions.
In 2008, Lapthisophon was awarded the prestigious Wynn Newhouse Award for artists with disabilities. In his statement upon receiving this award, Lapthisophon said, "Through investigation of issues of permanence and change in site-specific installations, I hope to...break down the barriers between where the work of art ends and everyday life begins." [1]
Opened in 2003, the Nasher Sculpture Center is a museum in Dallas, Texas, that houses the Patsy and Raymond Nasher collection of modern and contemporary sculpture. It is located on a 2.4-acre (9,700 m2) site adjacent to the Dallas Museum of Art in the Dallas Arts District.
Rachel Harrison is an American visual artist known for her sculpture, photography, and drawing. Her work often combines handmade forms with found objects or photographs, bringing art history, politics, and pop culture into dialogue with one another. She has been included in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the US, including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial and the Tate Triennial (2009). Her work is in the collections of major museums such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Tate Modern, London; among others. She lives and works in New York.
Matthew Monahan is an American contemporary artist based in Los Angeles. He works in a variety of artistic disciplines that incorporate mixed media and found objects such as "foam, folded and crumbled construction paper," glass vitrines, and drywall. His work references art history and literature, recalling the works of modernists such as Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp. His sculptures and installations often combine modernists refences with figurative "fragments of ancient, mainly Greco-Roman statues."
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.
Erick Lawrence Swenson is an American figurative sculptor living and working in Dallas, Texas.
Melvin "Mel" Edwards is an American artist, teacher, and abstract steel-metal sculptor. Additionally he has worked in drawing and printmaking. His artwork has political content often referencing African-American history, as well as the exploration of themes within slavery. Visually his works are characterized by the use of straight-edged triangular and rectilinear forms in metal. He lives between Upstate New York and in Plainfield, New Jersey.
Joshua Neustein is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in New York City. He is known for his Conceptual Art, environmental installations, Land Art, Postminimalist torn paper works, epistemic abstraction, deconstructed canvas works, and large-scale map paintings.
Linda Ridgway is an American artist in Dallas, TX known for sculpting and printmaking works. Her focus is on themes of femininity, tradition, and heritage. Ridgway is known for her bronze wall reliefs.
Anne Wilson is a Chicago-based visual artist. Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, Internet projects, photography, performance, and DVD stop motion animations employing table linens, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread and wire. Her work extends the traditional processes of fiber art to other media. Wilson is a professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jesús Bautista Moroles was an American sculptor, known for his monumental abstract granite works. He lived and worked in Rockport, Texas, where his studio and workshop were based, and where all of his work was prepared and finished before being shipped out for installation. In 2008, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Over two thousand works by Moroles are held in public and private collections in the United States, China, Egypt, France, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland.
Bettina Pousttchi is a German artist of German-Iranian descent. She currently lives in Berlin. She has worked in sculpture, photography, video and site-specific installation.
Dike Blair is a New York-based artist, writer and teacher. His art consists of two parallel bodies of work: intimate, photorealistic paintings and installation-like sculptures assembled from common objects—often exhibited together—which examine overlooked and unexceptional phenomena of daily existence in both a romantic and ironic manner. Blair emerged out of the late 1970s New York art scene, and his work relates to concurrent movements such as the Pictures Generation, Minimalism and conceptual art, while remaining distinct from and tangential to them. New York Times critic Roberta Smith places his sculpture in a "blurred category" crossing "Carl Andre with ikebana, formalist abstraction with sleek anonymous hotel rooms, talk-show sets with home furnishings showrooms." Cameron Martin writes in Artforum that the paintings are "rendered with a lucidity that extracts something metaphysical from the mundane."
Donald Lipski is an American sculptor best known for his installation work and large-scale public works.
Liz Larner is an American installation artist and sculptor living and working in Los Angeles.
Nairy Baghramian is an Iranian-born German visual artist, of Armenian ethnicity. Since 1984, she has lived and worked in Berlin. When the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum selected Baghramian as a finalist for the 2020 Hugo Boss Prize, they described Baghramian’s statues as: "...[Exploring] the workings of the body, gender, and public and private space."
Margaret Wharton (1943-2014) was an American artist, known for her sculptures of deconstructed chairs. She deconstructed, reconstructed and reimagined everyday objects to make works of art that could be whimsical, witty or simply thought-provoking in reflecting her vision of the world.
Karyn Olivier is a Philadelphia-based artist who creates public art, sculptures, installations and photography. Olivier alters familiar objects, spaces, and locations, often reinterpreting the role of monuments. Her work intersects histories and memories with present-day narratives.
Linnea Glatt is an artist born in Bismarck, North Dakota in 1949. Glatt graduated with a Bachelor's from Moorhead State University (Minnesota) in 1971 and then went on to receive a Master's from the University of Dallas (Texas) in 1972. She became an art instructor at Richland College and taught from 1974 to 1984. In 1985, she began teaching at Southern Methodist University (SMU) until 1988.
Kaleta Ann Doolin is an American artist and philanthropist. Doolin is known in particular for her advocacy for women artists.
Vicki Meek is an American visual artist, and Black community leader in Dallas.