Brooklyn, New York
Born 1972, Manassas, Virginia
Visual Artist
My artistic practice investigates the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment and the role of craft in the construction of national identity. I am interested in the ways history is performed through various activities of making, so I often visit open-air living history museums and work in response to those contexts. I use history as an aesthetic palette to produce performative sculptures and installations that invoke the notion of "civil war" as a metaphor for pervasive ambivalences between mainstream (Unionist) and counter-cultural (Secessionist) values and allegiances in the art world, queer and feminist communities, and the nation at large. The Muster was a public art event inspired by American civil war battle reenactments, in which I enlisted hundreds of individuals to fashion uniforms, build campsites and declare responses to the question "What are you fighting for?" on New York’s Governors Island. In Notion Nanny, I took on the role of an itinerant apprentice traveling throughout England and the U.S. engaging with artisans - blacksmiths, lace-makers, linen-weavers - in dialogues about the politics and economies of the handmade. Other sculptures "play" with commemorative and war memorial forms as scaled-up 19th century children's toys - wooden rifles, life-size porcelain dolls, and a monumental Hobby Horse, for example.
1999-2000 Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program
1999 M.F.A., Sculpture, Yale University School of Art
1995 B.F.A., Fine Arts, Parsons School of Design
1995 B.A., Psychology, Eugene Lang College, New School University
2007 Notion Nanny, University of California Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA
2005 The Muster, Public Art Fund, Governors Island, NY
2005 Victory Hall, Bellwether, New York, NY
2007 Grow Your Own, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
2006 Art in America, Arario Gallery, Cheonan, South Korea
2006 Ahistoric Occasion, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA
2006 The 'F' Word, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA
2005 Greater New York 2005, P.S. 1/MoMA, Long Island City, NY
2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship
2006 Artpace San Antonio Artist Residency
2005 Arts Council England Grant
2005 Public Art Fund Commission
| Year Awarded | 2008 |
| Category | Visual Arts |
Notion Nanny, photo by Sibila Savage; courtesy of the artist and the Saatchi Gallery, London
Hobby Horse, photo by Todd Johnson; courtesy of the artist
