Judy Fiskin
Encyclopedia
Judy Fiskin is an American artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts
. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum
in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
and James Turrell
. She got a Master's degree in art history at UCLA, compiled and edited the journals of Richard Neutra
, and was co-director of Womanspace Gallery in the mid-1970s. She started teaching photography in the art school at Cal Arts in 1977. In addition to her photography and video, she's also an award-winning writer for her essay "Borges, Stryker, Evans: The Sorrows of Representation," published originally in the photography journal Views in 1988, reprinted in Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on Photography, published by University of New Mexico Press in 1991.
type) in Los Angeles shot from across the street in a deadpan style. Other series focused on desert scenes, military buildings, and period furniture. In 1992, MOCA in Los Angeles held a mid-career retrospective for Fiskin; critics praised the intelligence, wit, and stylistic coherence of her work. Her photographs have been exhibited widely, including the Pompidou Center in Paris displaying 24 prints as part of their historic 2006 exhibit, "Los Angeles 1955-1985, Birth of an Art Capital," and MOCA Los Angeles displayed 15 prints in their 2009-2010 show "Collection: MOCA's First 30 Years." The Getty Museum will publish a catalogue raisonné of her complete photographs, Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin in December 2011 as part of the citywide exhibitions "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980." Her photos will be shown at five Pacific Standard Time exhibitions in 2011 and 2012: “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81,” at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; “In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980,” at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; “It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973,” at Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; "Seismic Shift: California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984" at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, and “Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles.
in Los Angeles. LACMA commissioned "What We Think About When We Think About Ships," a video installation at LACMALab based on a painting in its collection. Her 2003 video "50 Ways to Set the Table" documented the competition in table setting at the Los Angeles County Fair—a metaphor for the creative process and the work of the critic. That video has been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, at the Berkeley Film and Video Festival and at Angles Gallery, Santa Monica. Her 2007 video, "The End of Photography," a three-minute elegy for the darkroom, was exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Kassel, and in Los Angeles at the Getty, LACMA, MOCA, and at Angles Gallery. "Like all great works of art," David Pagel wrote in a review in the Los Angeles Times, the video "tells more than one story." In her 2010 video, "Guided Tour," which premiered at Angles Gallery in Los Angeles, the voices of two museum docents seem to describe various works of high and low art. "By turns poetic and funny," Fiskin said, "the film is about the talk around art and the mute beauty of photography, the disconcerting ties between kitsch and art, and the ultimate inadequacy of all kinds of description." Christopher Knight, art critic for the L.A. Times, called the video "inspired. . . a surprising journey into your own conflicted assumptions about substance and significance." "All Six Films" are running at Angles Gallery in Los Angeles Sept. 10-Oct 29, 2011.
Paul Schimmel, et al., Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-1981. Los Angeles, Prestel Publishing, 2011, pp. 150-151. (2 reproductions from 1975 "Military Architecture" series.)
Rebecca Peabody, et al., Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2011, p. 275. (1 reproduction from "Military Architecture," plus 1982 LAICA journal cover.)
"Judy Fiskin Interviewed by Rebecca McGrew." It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973. Pomona College Museum of Art, 2011, 282-87. (includes 5 reproductions from the 1973 "Stucco" series.)
Lyn Kienholz, L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980. California/International Arts Foundation, 2010, p.185.
Ann Goldstein et al., This is Not to be Looked At: Highlights from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art. MOCA Press, Los Angeles, 2008, pp.98-99.
Karen Higa, Living Flowers: Ikebana and Contemporary Art. Japanese-American National Museum, Los Angeles, 2009, pp.5, 44-45
Catherine Grenier, ed., Los Angeles 1955 - 1985: Birth of an Art Capital. exhibition catalog from the Centre Pompidou, 2006, pp. 251, 290-291.
Lisa Lyons, "Judy Fiskin: My Getty Center." in Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty. exhibition catalogue from the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2000, pp. 24-27.
Judy Fiskin, Some More Art. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992.
William Bartman, ed., Judy Fiskin. A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, 1988. Essay by Christopher Knight. Interview with John Divola. 26 reproductions of work from 1973-1988.
Judy Fiskin and Dick Barnes, Thirty-one Views of San Bernardino. Los Angeles: Spectator Press, Pomona College, 1975
California Institute of the Arts
The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...
. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an art museum in Los Angeles, California. It is located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles, adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits....
, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum
J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum, a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is an art museum. It has two locations, one at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, and one at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California...
in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...
in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
Biography
Judy Fiskin grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from omona College], where her classmates included future artists Chris BurdenChris Burden
Christopher "Chris" Burden is an American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.-Education:Burden studied for his B.A...
and James Turrell
James Turrell
James Turrell is an American artist primarily concerned with light and space. Turrell was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984. He is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York...
. She got a Master's degree in art history at UCLA, compiled and edited the journals of Richard Neutra
Richard Neutra
Richard Joseph Neutra is considered one of modernism's most important architects.- Biography :Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892. He was born into both-Jewish wealthy family...
, and was co-director of Womanspace Gallery in the mid-1970s. She started teaching photography in the art school at Cal Arts in 1977. In addition to her photography and video, she's also an award-winning writer for her essay "Borges, Stryker, Evans: The Sorrows of Representation," published originally in the photography journal Views in 1988, reprinted in Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on Photography, published by University of New Mexico Press in 1991.
Photography
Since her first show at Castelli Graphics in New York City in 1976, Fiskin's photographs have had the same distinctive format: small black-and-white images, two and one-half inches square, printed on letter-sized white paper. She began with vernacular architecture in Los Angeles and gained critical attention for her "Dingbat" series, anonymous small 1950s apartment buildings (of the dingbatDingbat (building)
A dingbat is a type of formulaic apartment building that flourished in the Sun Belt region of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, a vernacular variation of shoebox style "stucco boxes". Dingbats are boxy, two- or three-story apartment houses with overhangs sheltering street-front parking...
type) in Los Angeles shot from across the street in a deadpan style. Other series focused on desert scenes, military buildings, and period furniture. In 1992, MOCA in Los Angeles held a mid-career retrospective for Fiskin; critics praised the intelligence, wit, and stylistic coherence of her work. Her photographs have been exhibited widely, including the Pompidou Center in Paris displaying 24 prints as part of their historic 2006 exhibit, "Los Angeles 1955-1985, Birth of an Art Capital," and MOCA Los Angeles displayed 15 prints in their 2009-2010 show "Collection: MOCA's First 30 Years." The Getty Museum will publish a catalogue raisonné of her complete photographs, Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin in December 2011 as part of the citywide exhibitions "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980." Her photos will be shown at five Pacific Standard Time exhibitions in 2011 and 2012: “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81,” at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; “In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980,” at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; “It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973,” at Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; "Seismic Shift: California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984" at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, and “Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles.
Video
Fiskin began making video in 1998 with "Diary of a Midlife Crisis," a serio-comic video diary about a middle-aged photographer whose fear of moving the video camera provided a metaphor for her feeling of being creatively at a standstill. The video won awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival and at Worldfest Houston, and was screened at MOCA in Los Angeles, and in Bonn, Kassel, and Brisbane, among other places. Critical acclaim for that work led the J. Paul Getty Museum to commission the video installation "My Getty Center" in 2000, another comic personal video diary that chronicled the opening of the new Getty CenterGetty Center
The Getty Center, in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, is a campus for cultural institutions founded by oilman J. Paul Getty. The $1.3 billion center, which opened on December 16, 1997, is also well known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles...
in Los Angeles. LACMA commissioned "What We Think About When We Think About Ships," a video installation at LACMALab based on a painting in its collection. Her 2003 video "50 Ways to Set the Table" documented the competition in table setting at the Los Angeles County Fair—a metaphor for the creative process and the work of the critic. That video has been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, at the Berkeley Film and Video Festival and at Angles Gallery, Santa Monica. Her 2007 video, "The End of Photography," a three-minute elegy for the darkroom, was exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Kassel, and in Los Angeles at the Getty, LACMA, MOCA, and at Angles Gallery. "Like all great works of art," David Pagel wrote in a review in the Los Angeles Times, the video "tells more than one story." In her 2010 video, "Guided Tour," which premiered at Angles Gallery in Los Angeles, the voices of two museum docents seem to describe various works of high and low art. "By turns poetic and funny," Fiskin said, "the film is about the talk around art and the mute beauty of photography, the disconcerting ties between kitsch and art, and the ultimate inadequacy of all kinds of description." Christopher Knight, art critic for the L.A. Times, called the video "inspired. . . a surprising journey into your own conflicted assumptions about substance and significance." "All Six Films" are running at Angles Gallery in Los Angeles Sept. 10-Oct 29, 2011.
Artist's Books, Exhibition Catalogues and Monographs
Virginia Heckert, Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin. Getty Publications, forthcoming December 2011.Paul Schimmel, et al., Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-1981. Los Angeles, Prestel Publishing, 2011, pp. 150-151. (2 reproductions from 1975 "Military Architecture" series.)
Rebecca Peabody, et al., Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2011, p. 275. (1 reproduction from "Military Architecture," plus 1982 LAICA journal cover.)
"Judy Fiskin Interviewed by Rebecca McGrew." It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973. Pomona College Museum of Art, 2011, 282-87. (includes 5 reproductions from the 1973 "Stucco" series.)
Lyn Kienholz, L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980. California/International Arts Foundation, 2010, p.185.
Ann Goldstein et al., This is Not to be Looked At: Highlights from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art. MOCA Press, Los Angeles, 2008, pp.98-99.
Karen Higa, Living Flowers: Ikebana and Contemporary Art. Japanese-American National Museum, Los Angeles, 2009, pp.5, 44-45
Catherine Grenier, ed., Los Angeles 1955 - 1985: Birth of an Art Capital. exhibition catalog from the Centre Pompidou, 2006, pp. 251, 290-291.
Lisa Lyons, "Judy Fiskin: My Getty Center." in Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty. exhibition catalogue from the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2000, pp. 24-27.
Judy Fiskin, Some More Art. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992.
William Bartman, ed., Judy Fiskin. A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, 1988. Essay by Christopher Knight. Interview with John Divola. 26 reproductions of work from 1973-1988.
Judy Fiskin and Dick Barnes, Thirty-one Views of San Bernardino. Los Angeles: Spectator Press, Pomona College, 1975
External links
- Judy Fiskin Official Website
- Judy Fiskin Cal Arts page
- MOCA "Collections" retrospective
- Pompidou Center exhibition
- ArtForum review by Jan Tumlir
- Judy Fiskin interviewed by John Divola
- Archives of American Art, "Oral history interview with Judy Fiskin"
- "In Focus: Los Angeles 1945-1980" Getty Center - Pacific Standard Time exhibition
- "It Happened at Pomona" exhibition
- Angles Gallery, Los Angeles