Helen Mirra

Helen Mirra is an American conceptual artist. "[Like Henry David Thoreau, she is a] maximalist in a minimalist robe", with an idiosyncratic practice.[1] She is engaged with ideas common to buddhist[2][3][4] and pragmatist[5][6] philosophies, and since 2008 her art practice has been integrated with walking.[7] She has said of walking: "It is an unskilled activity, and a modest activity, and a free activity, and an always-available activity, and an equipment-free activity, and an active activity."[8] In an essay on Mirra's work, Yukio Lippit described her engagement thus: "Mirra’s practice champions walking as a specific form of thinking that bypasses language. Indeed, one senses that she shares with Zen Buddhists in particular a deep skepticism towards language as an authentic mechanism of discovery."[9] At the same time, she has often worked with language as a primary material.[10][11]

Helen Mirra
Born(1970-12-31)December 31, 1970
Rochester New York
EducationBennington College, University of Illinois at Chicago

Career

Helen Mirra has worked in diverse media including weaving,[12] writing - particularly indexes,[13][14][15] experimental music,[16][17] sculpture, 16mm film, and video. Travel and the landscape have been reoccurring themes,[18] as well as childhood and labor,[19] while keeping within a restricted palette.[20] Her first solo gallery exhibition was in Chicago in 1999 and included a 16mm silent film, textile works, and the vinyl record Along, Below, all relating to geography, and her first one-person institutional exhibition, Sky-wreck, at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 2001, was a indigo-dyed textile sculpture of a section of the sky, imagined as part of a geodesic structure.[21][22] In addition to John Cage,[23] Stanley Brouwn, André Cadere, and Douglas Huebler are key influences.[8]

She has an extensive exhibition history in North and South America, Europe, and Japan,[24][25] and participated in broad international exhibitions such as the 11th Havana Bienal, the 30th São Paulo Art Biennial and the 50th Venice Biennial. A fifteen-year (1995-2009) survey of her work, Edge Habitat, was presented in 2014 at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal, and the corresponding publication Edge Habitat Materials was published by WhiteWalls.[26]

She was a Senior Lecturer in Visual Art and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago (2001-2005)[27] and a Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University until 2013.[28] She has been an artist-in-residence at University of California at Berkeley,[29] and a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.[30] She lives in Northern California.[31]

Selected solo exhibitions

References
  1. Eleey, Peter (January 2006). "Reference Material". Frieze Magazine.
  2. "HIGH LINE ART COMMISSION: Helen Mirra, Half-smiler | Friends of the High Line".
  3. "Stephen Batchelor Talk". www.largeglass.co.uk.
  4. ""Not-knowing is most intimate": Helen Mirra in Conversation with Emmalea Russo". artcritical. 2015-09-13.
  5. "BAMPFA - Helen Mirra / MATRIX 209 - 65 Instants". archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu.
  6. "Collection FRAC Lorraine | Helen Mirra:Human Ken, 24". collection.fraclorraine.org.
  7. "Conscience de pierre press release". Galerie Nelson Freeman. 2010.
  8. ""This is my interest anyway - to not-demand" - Interview with Helen Mirra - Features - Metropolis M".
  9. Lippit, Yukio. ""Ambulations", gehend (Berlin: argobooks, 2013)" (PDF).
  10. "reference to book coinciding with exhibition: Nueve años caminando en las laderas". nordenhake.com.
  11. Mirra, Helen (2007). "Cloud, the, 3". JRP Ringier.
  12. Smith, Roberta. "Helen Mirra". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.
  13. "Helen Mirra: Cloud, the, 3 | Events: Reading | The Renaissance Society".
  14. "CABINET // Inventory / Index for Der Räuber". www.cabinetmagazine.org.
  15. "Public art by Helen Mirra appearing across the University of Chicago campus". March 31, 2006.
  16. "Paris Transatlantic recommendations".
  17. "sonambiente berlin 2006 | festival für hören und sehen | klang kunst sound art | 1.6.-16.7".
  18. "Helen Mirra, Hourly Directional - Art & Education".
  19. "Helen Mirra | Video Data Bank". www.vdb.org.
  20. "About This Artwork: Map of Parallel 52 North at a Scale of One Foot to One Degree". Art Institute of Chicago.
  21. "Helen Mirra: Skywreck". Renaissance Society.
  22. Walker, Hamza (2001). "Thread-skies" (PDF).
  23. Camper, Fred (July 8, 2005). "Chicago Reader: Rethinking Thought: Helen Mirra" (PDF).
  24. "Bienal de Cuenca". e-flux.
  25. "Helen Mirra at Taka Ishii Gallery".
  26. "Edge Habitat Materials, Helen Mirra, survey 1995-2009". University of Chicago Press.
  27. Stewart (2003). "Muse and medium" (PDF).
  28. "Visual and Environmental Studies faculty: Helen Mirra". 2013. Archived from the original on 2013-04-11.
  29. "ARC Visiting Artists".
  30. "Berliner Künstlerprogramm".
  31. Lerda, Andrea. "125. PART 1 / HELEN MIRRA".
  32. Richard, Frances (2002). "From Land and Sound to Thought" (PDF). Whitney Museum brochure.
  33. Farzin, Media (October 13, 2014). "Helen Mirra's "Waulked"". Art Agenda.
  34. Andersson, Axel (September 1, 2015). "Tid omvandlad till konkret rumslighet". Kunstkritikk.
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