Ann Hamilton

Hear Ann Hamilton discuss her career at this free lecture in Knowlton Hall’s Gui Auditorium. Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multimedia installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, Hamilton’s ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton's art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminal spaces is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason, and imagination.

A longtime friend of the Wexner Center, Hamilton's projects presented here include mercy, a performance with Meredith Monk (2001); appetite, her collaboration with choreographer Meg Stuart (1998); and the body and the object: Ann Hamilton 1984–1996, her Wexner Center-organized retrospective exhibition and the culmination of a Wexner Center Artist Residency Award in visual arts. Hamilton's installation dominion (1990) was featured in the center's inaugural exhibition New Works for New Spaces.

This lecture is cosponsored by the Knowlton School of Architecture.

Born in Lima, Ohio, in 1956, Ann Hamilton received a BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hamilton has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University since 2001, where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art. She founded Ann Hamilton Studio in Columbus in 1992.

Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the Heinz Award, MacArthur Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She represented the United States in the 1991 São Paulo Bienal, the 1999 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world. Her major museum installations include Park Avenue Armory (2013); The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis (2010); The Guggenheim Museum, New York (2009); Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (2006); La Maison Rouge Fondation de Antoine Galbert, Paris, France (2005); Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2004); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2003); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2003, 1991); The Wanas Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2002); Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan (2001); The Musee d'art Contemporain, Lyon, France (1997); The Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (1996); The Art Institute of Chicago (1995); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); The Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1994); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1993); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988).