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Dana Hoey is an American photographer born in San Francisco and based in the Hudson Valley, New York. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Wesleyan University and an M.F.A. in photography from the Yale University School of Art.
The artist’s work examines contemporary female identity through staged and directed photographs and videos, which set off “peculiarly allusive narrative sparks” by echoing familiar photographic and filmic conventions. At the beginning of her career, Hoey photographed her friends, but her oeuvre has since widened to portray women of all ages in various scenarios. Pushing the photographic and video medium’s tendency to blur the line between fact and fiction, interior and exterior appearance, Hoey interrogates the social roles that women play.
In 2017, Hoey conducted a residency project at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) in Michigan from February 11 – May 17. In addition to presenting her photographs and videos, she offered free jiu-jitsu self-defense classes to a group of local young women that the Detroit Police Athletic League assembled. The classes, which the artist filmed, linked the arts with concepts of social engagement, examining ways to foster bonds between police offices and the communities they serve. In the fall of 2012, Hoey presented The Phantom Sex, a survey exhibition at The University Art Museum at Albany, New York, featuring works created throughout her career since the 1990’s. An accompanying monograph was published for this exhibition by the university, which includes an essay by Johanna Burton.
Hoey has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Solo exhibitions include Dana Hoey: Five Rings, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI (2017); Dana Hoey & Em Rooney, Raising Cattle, Montreal (2016); Love Your Enemy, at the Albany Institute of History & Art, NY (2014); Experiments in Primitive Living, organized by Maurice Berger, at the Center for Art Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland in Baltimore, MD (2010); and Dana Hoey at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2000). Selected group exhibition include We Pictured You Reading This at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC (2010); Found on Facebook at the Arthur M. Berger Art Gallery, Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY (2010); and Muse at the Wildenberg Art Center, Tulane University in New Orleans, LA (2010).
Her work is held in various public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; Middlebury College Museum of Art, VT; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Princeton University Art Museum, NJ; The Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA.
[…] Dana Hoey describes former world champion boxer Alicia Ashley’s shadowboxing as ‘sublimely beautiful.’ Here, in a 44-foot-long wall mural at Chelsea’s Petzel Gallery, Ashley engages with […]
[…] Dana Hoey has a new studio in Kingston, New York. Normally she shoots her photographs outdoors but is transitioning to indoor shoots. Hoey has created photo sets in the studio. The sets consist of four sculptural metal people intended for people to dance around. While Hoey’s photos have historically been staged, she has been gradually giving her models more license although the work is still staged. For this most recent series she hires movement professionals and documents their movements. The sculptures are also musical instruments played percussively. […]
[…] Dana Hoey has a new studio in Kingston, New York. Normally she shoots her photographs outdoors but is transitioning to indoor shoots. Hoey has created photo sets in the studio. The sets consist of four sculptural metal people intended for people to dance around. While Hoey’s photos have historically been staged, she has been gradually giving her models more license although the work is still staged. For this most recent series she hires movement professionals and documents their movements. The sculptures are also musical instruments played percussively. […]