Ann Hamilton, one of the most challenging and provocative installation artists working today, will lecture on “The Practice of Work: From Silence to Speech” at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26.
The talk, sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, is free and open to the public and will take place in Brown Hall, Room 100. A reception for Hamilton will precede the talk at 5 p.m. in the Kemper Art Museum.
Hamilton — a 1993 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly nicknamed the “genius grant” — creates site-specific environments that combine new technologies with unusual, often playful materials and an almost theatrical sense of staging.
Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956, Hamilton earned a bachelor’s degree in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and a master’s degree in sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 1985. From 1985-1991, she taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 1992, she has lived in Columbus, Ohio. She is a professor of art at The Ohio State University.
Hamilton’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout North America, Europe and Japan. In 1999, her installation Myein represented the United States at the 48th Venice Biennale.
The piece included a large glass screen that both obscured and transformed the neo-classical American pavilion, which appeared to ripple behind it like water. Inside, newly uncovered skylights illuminated intense, fuchsia-colored powder (distributed by a hidden mechanical system) as it flowed slowly down the walls.
For Corpus, an acclaimed 2004 commission for Mass MoCA in North Adams, Mass., Hamilton fashioned a kind of indoor snow storm, filling the museum’s vast converted factory space with millions of sheets of fluttering white writing paper. The pages were continuously “inhaled” (in the artist’s phrase) and re-circulated by 40 large pneumatic mechanisms while bright natural light, screened by red silk organza, added a warm sunset glow.
Hamilton’s installations often include an element of performance and she frequently has collaborated with dancers and musicians.
In 1988, she won a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for her installation The Earth Never Gets Flat. Appetite, a collaboration with choreographer Meg Stuart and her company, Damaged Goods, toured Europe and the United States during the 1998-99 season.
Other honors include a Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (1998), a National Endowment for the Arts’ Visual Arts Fellowship (1993), the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1992) and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1989).
A book about Hamilton’s work by Joan Simon was published by Harry N. Abrams Inc. in 2002.
For more information, call 935-9347 or e-mail mara_hermano@wustl.edu.