Event Date
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Responsive to the contingencies of the sites where she works, her recurring forms—cloth, texts spoken and written, animals, and people suspended or in motion—immerse viewers in an atmosphere both visceral and literary, individual and collective, animate and inanimate, silent and spoken. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Among her many honors, Hamilton has been the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, 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 21st São Paulo Biennial and the 48th Venice Biennial and has exhibited extensively around the world. Hamilton is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University.
Michael Mercil lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art at The Ohio State University. He received an MFA from the University of Chicago in 1988, and a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in 1978. His art explores the realms of “the near, the low, the common” in works somewhere close to—if not always within—the categories of sculpture, drawing, painting, landscape architecture, film, performance, and farming. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions organized by museums and art centers throughout the United States.
In 2005, with Ann Hamilton, Mercil began The Living Culture Initiative, a project integrating their art practices within the core research framework of Ohio State University—a public land-grant college dedicated to teaching the “mechanical, agricultural and liberal arts.” In 2006, Mercil planted The Beanfield as an agri/cultural experiment with the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Social Responsibility Initiative in the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Because good farmers rotate crops, in 2008, Mercil converted The Beanfield into The Virtual Pasture (2008–2011) where he has proposed installing a green energy park and carbon storage bank called, Wind|Farm.
Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil portraits courtesy of Ann Hamilton Studio
WHEN: Thursday, April 28, 2022 from 4:30-6 pm
WHERE: Anne E. Pitzer Center.
Information on parking.
Organized by The California Studio in the Department of Art and Art History.