page_title: Laurie Anderson
section_title: 2010s
hierarchical_section_title: Laurie Anderson / Career / 2010s
caption_attribution_description: English: Laurie Anderson performing at her concert for dogs in Times Square
context_page_description: Laura Phillips Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She became more widely known outside the art world when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK singles chart in 1981. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.
  Anderson is a pioneer in electronic music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she collaborated with Interval Research to develop an instrument she called a "talking stick", a six-foot long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate sounds.
  Anderson met singer-songwriter Lou Reed in 1992, and was married to him from 2008 until his death in 2013.
context_section_description: In February 2010, Laurie Anderson premiered a new theatrical work, entitled Delusion, at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games.  This piece was commissioned by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and the Barbican Centre, London. Anderson was honored with the Women's Project Theater Woman of Achievement Award in March 2010. In May/June 2010, Anderson curated the Vivid Live festival in Sydney, Australia together with Lou Reed. Her new album Homeland was released on June 22. She performed "Only an Expert" on July 15, 2010, on the Late Show with David Letterman, and her song "Gravity's Angel" was featured on the Fox TV show So You Think You Can Dance the same day. She appears as a guest musician on several tracks from experimental jazz musician Colin Stetson's 2011 album New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges.
  Anderson developed a theatrical work, entitled "Another Day in America". The first public showings of this work-in-progress took place in Calgary, Alberta, in January 2012 as part of Theatre Junction Grand's 2011–12 season and One Yellow Rabbit's annual arts festival, the High Performance Rodeo. Anderson was named the Inaugural Distinguished Artist-In-Residence at The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in May 2012. In March 2013, an exhibition of Anderson's work entitled Laurie Anderson: Language of the Future, selected works 1971–2013 at the Samstag Museum was part of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in Adelaide, South Australia. Anderson performed her Duets on Ice outside the Samstag on opening night.
  Anderson received the Honorary Doctor of Arts from the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2013. In June/July 2013, Anderson performed "The Language of the Future" and guest curate at the River to River Festival in New York City. In November 2013 she was the featured Guest of Honor at the B3 Biennale of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, Germany In 2018, Anderson contributed vocals to a re-recording of the David Bowie song "Shining Star (Makin' My Love)", originally from Bowie's 1987 album Never Let Me Down. She was asked to join the production by producer Mario J. McNulty, who knew that Anderson and Bowie were friends.
  On February 10, 2019, at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, held in Los Angeles, Anderson and Kronos Quartet's Landfall won the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance. It was Anderson's first collaboration with Kronos Quartet and her first Grammy award, and was the second Grammy for Kronos. Inspired by her experience of Hurricane Sandy, Nonesuch Records said "Landfall juxtaposes lush electronics and traditional strings by Kronos with Anderson's powerful descriptions of loss, from water-logged pianos to disappearing animal species to Dutch karaoke bars."
  To the Moon, a collaboration with Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang, premiered at the Manchester International Festival on July 12, 2019. A 15-minute virtual reality artwork, To the Moon allows audience members to explore a moon that features donkey rides and rubbish from Earth, in a non-narrative structure. Alongside, a film shows the development of the new work.
caption: Anderson playing outside at a Times Square performance in 2016
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