Steve Kurtz is an American artist and co-founder of the art collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). His work with CAE is considered pioneering in the areas of politically engaged art, interventionist practices, and cultural research and action in the field of biotechnology and ecological struggle. [1] [2] [3] He is also a writer and educator.
Kurtz's arrest in 2004 for suspected “bioterrorism” is the subject of a film, Strange Culture , by Lynn Hershman Leeson, and served as inspiration for the novel Orfeo by Richard Powers. [4] [5]
Kurtz is a founding member of the award-winning art and theater collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Since its formation in 1987 in Tallahassee, Florida, CAE has been frequently invited to exhibit and perform projects examining issues surrounding information, communications and bio-technologies by museums and other cultural institutions. [6] These include the Whitney Museum and the New Museum in NYC; the Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C.; the ICA, London; the MCA, Chicago; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the London Museum of Natural History; the Kunsthalle Luzern; and Documenta(13). [7]
The collective has written seven books, and its writings have been translated into eighteen languages. Its work has been covered by art journals including Artforum, Kunstforum, and the Drama Review. [8] CAE is the recipient of awards, including the 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, [9] the 2004 John Lansdown Award for Multimedia, [10] and the 2004 Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation. [11]
Kurtz is emeritus professor of art at SUNY Buffalo, and former professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University.
In May 2004, Kurtz called 911 to report the death of his wife, Hope Kurtz, of congenital heart failure. [9] In order to create their art installations, the Kurtzes sometimes worked with biological equipment and had a small home lab and petri dishes containing biological specimens. At the time of Hope Kurtz's death they were working on an exhibit about genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Buffalo police deemed these materials suspicious and notified the FBI, who detained Kurtz for 22 hours without charge on suspicion of "bioterrorism." Meanwhile, dozens of federal agents in hazardous material suits raided the Kurtz home, seizing books, computers, manuscripts, and art materials, and removing Hope Kurtz's body from the county coroner for further analysis. [12]
Kurtz was allowed to return to his home one week later, after the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State had determined that nothing in the home posed any sort of public or environmental health or safety threat, and that Hope Kurtz had died of natural causes. [13]
In July 2004, a grand jury refused to bring any bioterrorism charges, but did indict Kurtz on federal criminal mail fraud and wire fraud charges. Also indicted was Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, who served as a scientific consultant on Critical Art Ensemble's projects. The charges concern the way Kurtz and Ferrell allegedly ordered and mailed the non-pathogenic bacteria used in several museum installations. Under the USA PATRIOT Act the maximum possible sentence for these charges has increased from five to twenty years in prison. [14] The charges related to how Ferrell allegedly helped Kurtz obtain $256 worth of harmless bacteria. "This is the first time in the history of the federal courts that the U.S. Department of Justice is intervening in the alleged breach of a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA) of nonhazardous materials in order to redefine it as a criminal offense[,]" reads a FAQ for a Kurtz defense fund website. [15]
In October 2007, Ferrell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. Ferrell's wife and daughter subsequently issued public statements saying the plea deal was due to the stress of the case and severe illness (Ferrell is a 27-year survivor of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and suffered a series of strokes following his indictment in 2004). [16] Ferrell was later sentenced to a year of unsupervised release and fined $500. [17]
Kurtz has received much of his legal representation from Paul Cambria, a Buffalo-based attorney who specializes in First Amendment issues.
On April 21, 2008, the indictment for mail and wire fraud was ruled "insufficient on its face" by the presiding Judge Richard Arcara. This means that, even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as fact) were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice (DoJ) had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action was taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. The only option left for the DoJ would be to re-indict Kurtz. [18]
The story of Kurtz is told in the film Strange Culture, 2007, by filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson. The film was simultaneously screened and webcast to the Second Life game on January 22, 2007. It focuses on Kurtz' art, character, and interaction with law enforcement. Strange Culture premiered at the Sundance International Film Festival in 2007. [19]
The Henry Art Gallery is a contemporary art museum located on the campus of the University of Washington, in Seattle, Washington, United States. Located on the west edge of the university's campus along 15th Avenue N.E. in the University District, it was founded in February, 1927, and was the first public art museum in the state of Washington. The original building was designed by Bebb and Gould. It was expanded in 1997 to 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2), at which time the 154-seat auditorium was added. The addition/expansion was designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects.
Peter Weibel was an Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator, and new media theoretician. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet, then later moved from the page to the screen within the sense of post-structuralist methodology. His work includes virtual reality and other digital art forms. From 1999 he was the director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
Kristine Stiles is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art and trauma. Her most recent book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, University of Chicago Press, 2016. She is best known for her scholarship on artists’ writings, performance art, feminism, destruction and violence in art, and trauma in art. Stiles joined the faculty of Duke in 1988, and she has taught at the University of Bucharest and Venice International University. She received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence in 1994, and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring in 2011, both at Duke University. Among other fellowships and awards include a J. William Fulbright Fellowship in 1995, a Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and an Honorary Doctorate from Dartington College of Arts in Totnes, Devon, England in 2005.
Jeff Jahn is a curator, art critic, artist, historian, blogger and composer based in Portland, Oregon, United States. He coined the phrase declaring Portland "the capital of conscience for the United States," in a Portland Tribune op-ed piece, which was then reiterated in The Wall Street Journal.
The following are controversial invocations of the USA PATRIOT Act. The stated purpose of the Act is to "deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes." One criticism of the Act is that "other purposes" often includes the detection and prosecution of non-terrorist alleged future crimes.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, California, United States. As an independent and non-collecting art museum, it exhibits the work of local, national, and international contemporary artists. Until May 2015, the museum was based at the Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. In May 2016, the museum announced an official name change to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and its relocation to Los Angeles's Downtown Arts District. The museum reopened to the public in September 2017.
Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance. For CAE, tactical media is situational, ephemeral, and self-terminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular socio-political context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that collectively could diminish the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.
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.
Strange Culture is a 2007 American documentary film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson and starring Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan.
BioArt is an art practice where artists work with biology, live tissues, bacteria, living organisms, and life processes. Using scientific processes and practices such as biology and life science practices, microscopy, and biotechnology the artworks are produced in laboratories, galleries, or artists' studios. The scope of BioArt is a range considered by some artists to be strictly limited to "living forms", while other artists include art that uses the imagery of contemporary medicine and biological research, or require that it address a controversy or blind spot posed by the very character of the life sciences.
Beatriz da Costa was an interdisciplinary artist known for her work at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering, and politics. Her projects took the form of public interventions and workshops, conceptual tool building, and critical writing.
!Women Art Revolution is a 2010 documentary film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson and distributed by Zeitgeist Films. It tracks the feminist art movement over 40 years through interviews with artists, curators, critics, and historians.
New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies. It comprises virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D printing, immersive installation and cyborg art. The term defines itself by the thereby created artwork, which differentiates itself from that deriving from conventional visual arts such as architecture, painting or sculpture.
Orfeo is a novel by American author Richard Powers.
Claire Pentecost is an American artist, a writer, and Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Her interdisciplinary practice interrogates the imaginative and institutional structures that organize divisions of knowledge, often focusing on nature and artificiality. Her work positions artistic practice as a research practice, advocating for the role of the amateur in the collection, interpretation, and mobilization of information. Her current projects focus on industrial and bioengineered agriculture, and the hidden costs of the global corporate food system.
Natasha Boas is a French-American contemporary art curator, writer, and critic. She has taught art history and curatorial studies at Yale, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibition on the Modernist Algerian artist, Baya Mahieddine Baya: Woman of Algiers in 2018 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University garnered her international critical attention. In 2017 she was featured in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Vertighost, playing the role of herself as an art historian. She also authored the Facebook Artist in Residence book on the recent history of Art and Technology in the Bay Area for the 5th anniversary of Facebook's artist-in-residency program. An adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, she is an expert in the art of California countercultures, the modernist avant-garde, surrealist women artists, the Mission School and Outsider artists.
Jori Finkel is an American writer and editor who specializes in contemporary art. She is best known for analyzing the inner workings of the art market and for chronicling the Los Angeles art scene during its expansion at the beginning of the 21st century.
Moira Roth was an English-born American art historian, feminist art critic, and educator.
Dawn Luryn Hershman is an American oncologist. Since 2020, she has served as the American Cancer Society Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Columbia University.
American new media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson has created a number of feature-length films, short films, and documentaries as part of her practice.
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