Artist's Talk: Ann Hamilton

16 March 2011 | 5:00–6:30pm
Harrison Auditorium, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street

Ann Hamilton is a renowned and impressively versatile figure on today’s art scene: multimedia artist, photographer, videographer, sculptor, textile artist, performer, and more. Her career has included installations at the Venice Biennale and New York’s Guggenheim Museum, installations noted for the unexpected ways they respond to live and virtual presences in their specific locations. She will illuminate these presences and describe how the artist interacts with them.

Internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multimedia installations, Ann Hamilton creates liminal environments that are rich in accumulated material. Her installations create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites.

Born in Lima, Ohio in 1956, Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, she has been a Professor of Art at The Ohio State University.

Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She has represented the United States in the 1991 Sao Paulo Bienal, the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world.

Her major museum installations include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (1991); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Musee d'art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); and The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002).

Hamilton's public sculpture projects include commissions for The San Francisco Public Library (with Ann Chamberlain), as well as The Allegheny Riverfront Park, Pittsburgh and Teardrop Park, Battery Park City, New York (both with Michael Van Valkenburgh and Michael Mercil). Most recently, she participated in The Third Mind exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum with human carriage, a site-specific installation in the museum's rotunda. Her multimedia exhibition stylus opened at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis on July 9, 2010 and ran through January 22, 2011.