Installation ArtContemporary Artists

Installation Art

Art that is created for a specific site, often incorporating materials or physical features of the site.

Contemporary Artists

Artists of the present age; belonging to the same period of time; modern, current.• Maya Lin• Janine Antoni• Judy Pfaff•Martin Puryear

Maya Lin

Maya Lin catapulted into the public eye when she submitted the winning design in the national competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Trained as an artist and architect, her sculptures, parks, monuments, and architectural projects are linked by a desire to make a place for individuals within the landscape.

Maya Lin talks about architecture, memorials, and being an artist | PBS

Lin Biography

•Born in 1959 in Athens, Ohio•She was trained as an artist and architect, and her sculptures, parks, monuments, and architectural projects are linked by her ideal of making a place for individuals within the landscape.• Lin, a Chinese-American, came from a cultivated and artistic home. Her father was the dean of fine arts at Ohio University; her mother is a professor of literature at Ohio University. •She draws inspiration for her sculpture and architecture from culturally diverse sources, including Japanese gardens, Hopewell Indian earthen mounds, and works by American earthworks artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

“Vietnam Veterans

Memorial”

1982Black granite, each wall: 246 feet long, 10 1/2 feet high, Washington D.C.Courtesy the National Park Service

“The Wave Field”

1995Shaped earth, 100 x 100 feet, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

"With the 'Wave Field' in Michigan, it was for an aerospace engineering building and I had no idea what I was going to do. My site could have been in the building they were building or outside. And I just read up on aerospace and flight for three months and then came up with the idea of the 'Wave Field,' which is basically a book image of a natural occurring water wave that came about because flight requires resistance, and that led to turbulence studies, which led to fluid dynamics."- Maya Lin

Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni’s work blurs the distinction between performance art and sculpture. Antoni transforms everyday activities such as eating, bathing, and sleeping into ways of making art, such as painting and sculpting. Themes in her work include mortality, desire and the body.

Antoni Biography

•Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas in 1964. •She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. •Antoni’s primary tool for making sculpture has always been her own body. She has chiseled cubes of lard and chocolate with her teeth, washed away the faces of soap busts made in her own likeness, and used the brainwave signals recorded while she dreamed at night as a pattern for weaving a blanket the following morning.

“Moor”

2001Dimensions variableInstallation views, "Free Port," at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthalle, SwedenCourtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine

“Moor,” details

"I asked my friends to give me materials to put into the rope. A lot of people gave me materials from friends who had passed away. Giving them to me to put into the rope is like giving them another life, another form. I wonder whether the viewer can uncover these stories through their experience of the object, whether these stories are somehow held in the material." - Janine Antoni

"Moor" rope sculpture by Janine Antoni | PBS rope sculpture

Judy Pfaff

A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between the two- and three-dimensional. Pfaff’s site-specific installations pierce through walls and careen through the air, achieving lightness and explosive energy. Pfaff’s work is a complex ordering of visual information composed of steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and natural elements such as tree roots.

Pfaff Biography

•Judy Pfaff was born in London, England in 1946. •She received a BFA from Washington University, Saint Louis (1971) and an MFA from Yale University (1973). •Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. •She has extended her interest in natural motifs in a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations, and has developed her dramatic sculptural materials into set designs for several theatrical stage productions.

“Buckets of Rain”"Buckets of Rain" installation by Judy Pfaff at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, New York | PBS

2006Wood, steel, wax, plaster, fluorescent lights, paint, black foil, expanding foam, and tape; 2 galleries, 153 x 245 1/2 x 209 inches and 153 x 228 1/2 x 165 inches.

Installation view: Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art, New York. Photo by Zonder Title and Jordan Tinker. Courtesy the artist and Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art , New York.

“Buckets of Rain,” details

"Last year it just seemed like everyone I knew died . . . my mother, Al Held (my former teacher), good friends. And I just wanted my 2006 show to be emotional. So I was basing this work on images of darkness and a kind of wilder characteristic than my other stuff. Before, the work was still chaotic but the last show was so pretty. And I thought, "This is not pretty, this is going to go to the other side." I was even looking at images in Dante’s 'Inferno'. So it was going to be a lot of dramatic, dark imagery."- Judy Pfaff

Judy Pfaff, Installing "Buckets of Rain"

“Round Hole, Square Peg”

1997Mechanical steel tubing, plaster, pigment, tree stumps, wood, cast rubber, expanding urethane foam, and pencil; five galleries, main gallery approximately 10 x 10 x 25 feet. Installation view: Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York. Photo by: Rob van Erve.

"The work has always had two components in it. There’s organization and finesse, which always sort of surprises me, and then this roughness in it and a sort of put-together aspect, too. But I think both of those things interest me. One is probably more who I am, and the other is who I would like to be."- Judy Pfaff

Martin Puryear

Puryear’s objects and public installations—in wood, stone, tar, wire, and various metals—are a marriage of Minimalist logic with traditional ways of making.

Puryear’s evocative, dreamlike explorations in abstract forms retain vestigial elements of utility from everyday objects found in the world.

Puryear Biography

•Martin Puryear was born in Washington, D.C., in 1941. •After earning his BA from Catholic University in Washington D.C., Puryear joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, and later attended the Swedish Royal Academy of Art. He received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1971. •A favorite form that occurs in Puryear’s work, the thick-looking stone bulge is surprisingly hollow, coloring the otherwise sturdy shape with qualities of uncertainty, emptiness, and loss.

“That Profile”

1999, Stainless steel/bronze,

a commissioned sculpture for the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Photo: Lynn Davis, © J. Paul Getty Trust.

“Ladder for Booker T.

Washington”

Puryear’s Ladder reflects handcraft techniques he honed abroad while studying in West Africa and in Scandinavia. The side rails, polished strands of wood, are fashioned from a golden ash sapling that once grew on Puryear’s upstate New York property;and the ladder’s now sinuous, now sharp, rails, connected by round, lattice-like rungs that swell in the middle, reflect thewood’s organic cycle of growth and change.

Abstraction and "Ladder for Booker T. Washington"