Eleanor Antin

When she began her artistic career in New York, she started off as a painter and later turned to making assemblages, but starting in the 1960s she began to do the conceptual projects that would become her focus. The first was Blood of a Poet Box (1965-1968), in which she took blood samples from poets and put them on slides. The work, which was inspired by Jean Cocteau’s film Blood of a Poet, eventually held 100 samples, including blood from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and is in the collection of the Tate Modern. In 1969, she created a portrait, Molly Barnes, out of "a lush lavender bath rug, a noisy electric Lady Schick razor, a patch of spilled talcum powder and a scattering of pink and yellow pills." Molly Barnes was just one of a series of "semantic portraits of people, sometimes real, some-times fictional, [made] out of configurations of brand-new consumer goods" that Antin created. 100 Boots is Antin's best-known conceptual work. In this project, she set up 100 boots in various configurations and settings, photographed them, and created 51 postcards of the images that were mailed to hundreds of recipients around the world from 1971 to 1973. 100 Boots relied on the recipients to remember and construct the boots' adventures, as the postcards were mailed out at intervals ranging from 3 days to 5 weeks "depending upon what [Antin] took to be the 'internal necessities' of the narrative." It documents the boots in a mock picaresque photo diary, beginning at the Pacific Ocean and ending in New York City, where their journey was presented in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In a famous performance work of 1972, Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, Antin photographed her naked body at 148 successive stages during a month of crash-dieting. The somber, almost classical work is a staple of early feminist art, according to the New York Times art critic Karen Rosenberg. In The Eight Temptations, 1972, Antin poses in mock histrionic gestures, resisting the temptation to eat snack foods that would violate her diet. In the 1970s/80s, she created several videos in which she played invented personae, including an Elizabethan-style king, a Romantic-era ballerina, a contemporary black movie star called Eleanora Antinova, and Eleanor Nightingale, a character that is a combination of Florence Nightingale and the artist herself. In 1974, Antin described these impersonations as part of her overarching interest in the transformational nature of the self: "I was interested in defining the limits of myself. I consider the usual aids to self-definition—sex, age, talent, time and space—as tyrannical limitations upon my freedom of choice." From the 70s until the 90s Antin embodied multiple alter egos in a project that she called "Selves" that implemented through several art forms. This project encompassed four videos: The King (1972), The Ballerina and the Bum (1974), The Adventures of a Nurse (1976), and From the Archives of Modern Art (1987). In her 1991 movie The Man Without A World she assumes the persona of Yevgeny Antinov, a fictional Russian Jewish silent film director from the 1920s. In 1997, Antin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts. More recently, Antin completed two large scale photographic series inspired by Roman history and mythology: The Last Days of Pompeii, 2002, and Roman Allegories, 2005. Her work was profiled in Season Two of the PBS series Art:21. She has had dozens of solo exhibitions and has been repres

1969: California Lives, Gain Ground Gallery, New York, USA 1971: Library Science, Brand Library Art Centre, Los Angeles, USA 1971:Portraits of Eight New York Women, Chelsea Hotel, New York, USA 1971: 100 BOOTS, United States Postal Distribution 1972: Traditional Art, Henri Gallery, Washington D.C, USA; Orlando Gallery, Los Angeles, USA 1972:Library Science, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, USA; University of California, San Diego; Austin Peay State University, Clarksville,, USA 1973: 100 BOOTS, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA 1973: Part of an Autobiography, Portland Centre for the Visual Arts, Portland, USA 1973: More Traditional Art, Northwood Experimental Art Institute, Dallas, USA 1973: I Dreamed I was a Ballerina, Orlando Gallery, Los Angeles, USA 1974: Several Selves, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, USA 1974: The Ballerina and the King, Galleria Forma, Genoa, Italy, 1974: Black is Beautiful, University of California Irvine, Irvine, USA 1975: The Kitchen, New York, USA 1975: 2 Transformations, (The Ballerina Goes to the Big Apple), Stefanotty Gallery, New York, USA 1976: Aleanor Antin, R.N. (Escape from the Tower, It's Still the Same Old Story), The Clocktower, New York, USA 1977: The Angel of Mercy, M.L. D'Arc Gallery, New York, USA; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, USA 1977: The Nurse and the Hijackers, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 1977: 100 BOOTS Once Again (Part 1), Choreographies (Part 2), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, USA 1978: The Ballerina, Whitney Museum, New York, USA 1978:The Nurse and the Hijackers, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, USA 1979: Before the Revolution, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 1979: 100 BOOTS: Transmission and Reception, Franklin Furnace, New York, USA 1979: The Black Ballerina, Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago, USA 1980: Recollections of my Life with Diaghilev, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 1981: Angel of Mercy (Angel of Mercy full revival), Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Nova Gallery, Vancouver, Canada 1981: Early Works, Palomar College, San Marcos, USA 1982: Recollections of my Life with Diaghilev, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, USA 1982: Battle of the Bluffs, La Mamelle, Inc./Art Com, San Francisco, USA 1983: El Desdichado, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 1983: Recollections of my Life with Diaghilev. (Recollections of my Life with Diaghilev) Tortue Gallery, Los Angeles, USA 1986: Loves of a Ballerina, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 1988: Loves of a Ballerina, MAG Galleries, Los Angeles, USA; Installation Gallery, San Diego,, USA. 1989: Retrospective of Photographic Works, Artemisia, Chicago, USA 1991: The Man Without a World, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla,, USA 1995: 100 Boots Revisited, Craig Krull Gallery, Los Angeles, USA 1996: Eleanor Antin: Ghosts, Southeastern Centre for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, USA 1997: Eleanor Antin: Selections from the Angel of Mercy, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA 1998: Maintenance Works, 1969-1979, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, USA 1999: Eleanor Antin Retrospective, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA 2000: Eleanor Antin | Harum Farocki, Fundação das Descobertas, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal 2000: Eleanor Antin: A Retrospective, The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis,, USA 2001: Eleanor Antin: Real Time Streaming, Mead Gal

1969: Language 3, Dwan Gallery, New York, NY, USA "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, March 4-July 16, 2007, Los Angeles, California. "Elles@CentrePompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the National Modern Art Museum" at the Pompidou Center, March 23-May 23, 2010, Paris, France. "State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970", "Pacific Standard Time" at the Getty Center, October 1, 2011 – February 5, 2012, Los Angeles, California, and Bronx Museum of Art, June 23-September 8, 2013, Bronx, New York. "Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1954-1977" at the Art Institute of Chicago, December 10, 2011 – March 11, 2012, Chicago, Illinois. "Correspondances" at the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, February 1-May 5, 2013, Paris, France.

1997: Guggenheim Fellowship 1998: National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Award 2003: International Association of Art Critics, Best Gallery Show for "The Last Days of Pompeii" 2009: Awarded The Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2023: UC San Diego Revelle Medal Award, highest award to an emeritus Professor bestowed annually by the University Chancellor