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Shimon Attie is an internationally renowned visual artist, whose practice includes creating permanent and temporary site-specific installations in public places, immersive mixed-media installations for museums and galleries, art photographs, and new media works.
In many of his projects, Attie has a used a variety of media to animate public sites with images of their lost histories or speculative futures. This has included introducing the stories of sometimes marginalized and/or forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present.
In creating his works, Attie often engages local communities in finding new ways of representing their history, memory, and potential futures, and explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place and identity.
Shimon Attie’s work has been exhibited and collected by numerous museums around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, The National Gallery in Washington DC, and the Miami Art Museum, among many others. In addition, he has received numerous visual artist fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and a Visual Artist Fellowship from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute.
Several books have been published on Attie’s work, which has also been the subject of a number of films, which have aired on PBS, BBC, and ARD. Since receiving his MFA Degree in 1991, he has realized approximately 25 major projects in ten countries around the world. Most recently, in 2013-14, Attie was awarded the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award in Art.
It doesn’t seem like a typical art installation. But it is so smartly compiled that no doubt everybody wants to see the art objects.
[…] Shimon Attie exhibited two major museum shows in the last year examining issues pertaining to refugees. Presently he is beginning work on a public, site-specific media installation in the waters of the East River in Manhattan and Brooklyn. This, too, will address the topic of immigrants and refugees. The piece is slated for September 2018. The project is backed by a New York nonprofit called More Art whose mission is to produce public art that engages local communities in New York City. While much of Attie’s work appears message-oriented and examines issues he cares about, he says, “ultimately I’m trying to be a good artist and make strong work.” Rather his work is non-binary and open to interpretation. In spring of 2017, Attie showed two works at the St. Louis Art Museum. One, a commissioned new work, was titled Lost in Space (After Huck). The work drew on the museum’s proximity to both the Mississippi River and Ferguson, Missouri, bringing together historical and present-day issues of race. The second piece titled The Crossing, exhibited in both St. Louis and Germany is a single channel short video created with seven Syrian refugees who had recently arrived in Europe on a raft. The piece uses the game of Roulette as a metaphor for the refugee experience. St. Louis Art Museum recently acquired The Crossing for their permanent collection. Lost in Space (After Huck) will be shown by Jack Shainman gallery’s upstate space, The School in Kinderhook, New York. […]