Erik Levine

Erik Levine is an American visual artist. He is a Professor of Art in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Levine is most known for his videos, sculptures, and drawings, with his works featured in the public collections of museums, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

Early life and career Levine was born in 1960 and grew up in Los Angeles, California. He pursued his undergraduate studies at California State University Northridge and University of California Los Angeles. He then returned to college later and received his BA from Thomas Edison State College. He has been serving as the Professor of Art in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston since 2005. His sculptures, which were shown at the Diane Brown Gallery in 1988, blended Minimalist and Post-Minimalist influences, showcasing organic geometries crafted from thin-skinned wood. Furthermore, his artwork Apparatus, displayed in an exhibition at Ruth Bloom Gallery in Los Angeles, California in 1998 blended industrial plastic foam scaffolding with organic polyurethane forms, creating a contrast between rigidity and organic fluidity, symbolizing the inherent contradictions in reliance on disposable man-made materials. His video work displayed in a 2017 exhibition Dying well—False death conveyed an exploration of the nature of death, delving into themes of fascination, fear, and changing perceptions of mortality.

Much of Levine's recent work features video installations, which include Grip in 2005, coyoteNorth in 2013, Scenario in 2018 and The Guilty Sleep in 2022. His 2016 work titled Still Lifes explored the impact of aging by showcasing the lives of elderly individuals in retirement homes and assisted living facilities, using their experiences to symbolize the passage of time and life journeys.

Throughout his career, Levine has been a recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pollock-Krasner Foundation awards, as well as having been a resident at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency. He has received support and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reception Cathy Curtis, writing for the Los Angeles Times while examining his work Apparatus, in an exhibition at the Newport Harbor Art Museum said "Erik Levine's huge Apparatus, is a promised gift to the museum, sets up a tense dialogue between right-angled plastic foam scaffolding and the polyurethane forms--resembling sliced gourds--that it encloses." She also commended his approach, which involved utilizing a combination of disposable man-made materials, a rigid grid, and a pair of organic shapes. Additionally, Michael Kimmelman also reviewed his work displayed at Diane Brown Gallery. He praised the way in which the use of glue, putty, and staples in his artwork adds a unique textural quality to the pieces, resulting in an unusual and quite graceful poetic quality.

In his review of Levine's plywood sculpture titled Hand Held (1997), Veron Ennis appreciated his efforts to capture the essence of masculinity through geometric form and raw material. Furthermore, he complimented his video work for its immersive exploration of exclusive sectors within the masculine world.

Exhibitions Levine's exhibitions includes a series of solo exhibitions held at galleries and museums in both the United States and Europe. His solo exhibitions include Diane Brown Gallery, New York (1988);, Videonale.16, Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany, (2017); Dying well—False death, Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg, Germany (2017); The New School, New York, NY Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany Madison Art Center, Madison, WI The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA The Museum of Contemporary Art, Geneva, Switzerland Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, NY Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX Magasin III Museum & Foundation for Contemporary Art, Stockholm, Sweden McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX Williams College Museum of Art in Public Collections

Awards and honors 1992 – Guggenheim Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation 2004 – Grant, Nancy Graves Foundation 2010 – Residency, Outpost Artists Resources 2019 – Rauschenberg Residency, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation