Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects
Ann Hamilton was born in 1956 in Lima, Ohio. She trained in textile design at the University of Kansas, and later received an MFA from Yale University. While her degree is in sculpture, textiles and fabric have continued to be an important part of her work, which includes installations, photographs, videos, performances, and objects. In recent work, she has experimented with exchanging one sense organ for another. In 1993, she won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. As the 1999 American representative at the Venice Biennale, she addressed topics of slavery and oppression in American society with an installation that used walls embossed with Braille. After teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1985 to 1991, she returned to Ohio, where she lives and works.Joan Simon is curator-at-large for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is a writer, curator, editor and arts administrator based in Paris, and has worked independently for museums, foundations and publishers in the United States and in Europe. Among her books and catalogues are works on Ann Hamilton and Susan Rothenberg, as well William Wegman: Funney/Strange.