Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton (born 1956) is an American visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s, known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.

Personal life

Ann Hamilton was born in Lima, Ohio. She attended St. Lawrence University from 1974–1976; University of Kansas, BFA in Textile Design, 1979; Yale School of Art, MFA in Sculpture, 1985. Currently she resides in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband Michael Mercil, also an artist.

Themes and inspiration

Though Hamilton studied textile design throughout her undergraduate career, she pointedly decided to focus on sculpture instead of weaving as a concentration in graduate school. She claims that, when making that decision, she was “interested in the relationships between things in space. And more important than the things themselves is the way they come into relation.” While in Canada, and while teaching at UC Santa Barbara, Hamilton began creating an interdisciplinary art with textiles "weaved" with photography and performance; often resulting in different elements combined in an image or includes textiles like pressed shirts or work uniforms.

In addition to her educational background. She identifies herself as a reader: of space, of objects, As a conceptual artist working with video, sound, and interactive installation, the elements of time, change, and decay also play roles in her work. Hamilton's installations are meant to be experienced with all the senses, often incorporating elements like sound and smell that urge the viewer to connect with and engage the work on a multi-sensory level. Her works also often respond to the spaces and cities in which they are created, using objects that reflect the history and identity of the culture. She then stood, wearing the suit, for the duration of the installation within the studio with viewers walking around the artist without interacting with her. The suit was originally made as a part of a work titled room in search of a position, which, after exhibition, Hamilton believed didn't reach pictorial success and decided to rethink her use of these made objects. However, Hamilton later incorporated the toothpick suit into an installation titled suitably positioned, which finally created a connection between the object, a suit, and the figure, herself within the suit. This installation was directly associated with her body object series. The installation was organized into two zones, one that demonstrated memory lost and the other memory experienced. She created the piece as a commissioned work as a part of the Places with a Past exhibition within the Spoleto Festival, in which artists chose a site and responded to both the historical and current context of the city. The installation was an homage to labor, respectfully commenting on and remembering the process of manual work through sculptural elements like a pile of 47,000 blue work uniforms and sacks full of soybeans hanging on a wall.

tropos

In 1993 she performed her piece tropos at Dia Center for the Arts. The Greek word tropos indicates a turn, physically or figuratively. For the art piece, Hamilton covered the entire warehouse floor with varying colored interwoven horse hair. She sat at a small table, located in the middle of the room. While sitting at the table, she studiously burned each word from a book with an electric heated coil.

Allegheny Riverfront Park

(1993–2001) Between this time period, numerous designers and artists including Ann Hamilton came together to create a new park design for Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This park would include a lower level that would be thirty five feet wide and nearly a mile long, as well as an upper level that would travel along Fort Dusquesne Boulevard. While knowing that the city had traffic, the artists wanted to keep true to the busy city aspect as well as create beauty in nature. They would create a board walk with trees following all the way down, stone edge that would be used as places to sit, overall the artists intended to create a peaceful place with a beautiful view of the city.

2001–2010 the picture is still

This video was exhibited in Taura, Japan in 2001. To create the video, Hamilton used a small surveillance camera positioned very near a black-and-white photograph of her son, over which she moved her hand in a continuous, slow motion. Because of the camera's position, the small lens, and the movement of her hand, which she calls "hand-seeing," the image in the video is often abstract and out of focus, a blur of mouths and noses. Hamilton participated in the exhibition, creating an installation entitled human carriage. The artist's installation reflected her interests in humanity, language, text, and physical material and referenced the movement and transmission of cultural information and identity through the use of books and a manual mechanism of travel. The artist tied together cross-sections of book volumes, which she called "book weights," that were stored in piles at the top of the museum. The book weights were then attached to a pulley system "carriage" operated by a "reader" at the top of the museum who manually returned the carriage to the bottom of the rotunda where the bound books accumulated in a pile. Along the building's existing spiral ramps, Hamilton also constructed a spiraling pipe that acted as a travel mechanism for a smaller bell carriage that housed Tibetan cymbals. The installation featured a white curtain punctuated by large swings that spanned the 55,000 square feet of space. The installation, like many of Hamilton's works, changed over time, involving the audience in an interconnected, multi-sensory experience of space. For this installation, the artist involved the use of radios in paper bags that were available for viewers to carry around; the audio on these radios was broadcast by two actors from the theater company SITI who read selections of text by various authors at one end of the room.

Cortlandt Street subway station project

The New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts and Design Program commissioned Hamilton to create an art project as a part of the reconstruction of Manhattan's Cortlandt Street subway station that was destroyed on September 11, 2001. This project, to be completed by 2018, is similar to her previous work, VERSE, in that it weaves together words, but in this specific case uses texts from notable historical documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The text is white and appears upon or within the surface of the white walls of the station, covering up to 70 percent of the walls' surface. As in much of her work, Hamilton intends this project to be experienced rather than simply viewed. Intended for each person travelling through the station to have a different relationship with these words.

O N E E V E R Y O N E

Hamilton photographs numerous different people of all different races and ethnicity through a semi-transparent membrane or window. The only time the view could see an image clearly was when the person would touch the membrane. On two opposite sides, Hamilton would instruct the subject to move how she wanted, solely relying on her voice to instruct them. Hamilton feels as if this relates to the medical field in always waiting for answers, check ups, and having a semi blinded sense of what is going on and just relying on a voice, no physical person.

Select exhibitions

Hamilton has exhibited around the world, including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988) Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993) Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994) The Museum of Modern Art, New York (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) The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002) The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2003, 1991) MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2003) Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004) La Maison Rouge Fondation de Antoine Galbert, Paris, France (2005) Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2006) The Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009) The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis (2010) Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS (2013) The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA (2016)

Select works

the event of a thread (2012) VERSE (2011) stylus (2010) human carriage (2009) The Meditation Boat (2005–2009) tower · Oliver Ranch (2007) voce (2006) phora (2005) corpus (2004) Teardrop Park, a collaboration with Michael Mercil and Michael Van Valkenburgh (2004) LEW wood floor at the Seattle Public Library (2004) lignum (2002) Allegheny Park, a collaboration with Michael Mercil and Michael Van Valkenburgh (1993-2001) the picture is still (2001) ghost....a border act (2000) (1999) mattering (1997) lineament (1994) tropos (1994) indigo blue (1991/2007) privation and excesses (1989) still life (1988)

Selected group exhibitions

Rites of Spring, Twining Gallery, New York, 1985 Elements, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York, 1987 United States Artists Fellowship, Bessie Award in 1988, National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, MacArthur Fellows Program "Genius Grant",

In 2014, Ohio State University announced that it was compiling an archive called the Ann Hamilton Project Archive, which will maintain images of more than 35 of Hamilton's installations. And in September 2015, Hamilton received the National Medal of Arts.