Ann Hamilton (artist)

Ann Hamilton
Born	June 22, 1956 (1956-06-22) Lima, Ohio
Nationality	American
Field	Installation, Textiles, Sculpture, Video, Photography
Training	University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS - BFA in Textile Design; Yale University, New Haven, CT - MFA in Sculpture
Movement	Installation Art
Awards	Heinz Award (2008), United States Artists Fellowship (2007), Environmental Design Research Association Place Design Award (2002), American Society of Landscape Architects Design Award (2002), Progressive Architecture Citation Award (1997), NEA Visual Arts Fellowship (1993), MacArthur Fellowship (1993) Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1992), and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1989)

Ann Hamilton (born June 22, 1956, Lima, Ohio) is a contemporary American artist best known for her installations, textile art, and sculptures, but is also active in the fields of photography, printmaking, video, and video installation.

She trained in textile design at the University of Kansas and later received an MFA from Yale University in sculpture. She taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1985 to 1991 and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 1993.

In 1999, Hamilton was the American representative to the Venice Biennale with an installation of walls embossed with Braille, which caught a red powder as it slid down from above.

Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is one of her major commissions.

Ann Hamilton was named a 2007 Agnes Gund Foundation Fellow and awarded a $50,000 grant by United States Artists, a public charity that supports and promotes the work of American artists.

In 2008, she won the 14th Annual Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities.

In February 2009, Hamilton installed human carriage in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum, New York as part of the exhibition “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989”. Her formal description of human carriage reads “Installation of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound,” and the Guggenheim Museum described its working thus: “Hamilton devises a mechanism that traverses the entire Guggenheim balustrade, taking the form of a white silk ‘bell carriage’ with Tibetan bells attached inside. As the cage spirals down along the balustrade, the purifying bells ring, awakening viewers. The mechanism is hoisted back up to a post at the uppermost Rotunda Level 6, where an attendant exchanges weights composed of thousands of cut-up books that counter the pulley system that propels the mechanism itself."

Major works

Some of her best known installations include:

• stylus (2010)
• human carriage (2009)
• voce (2006)
• phora (2005)
• corpus (2004)
• lignum (2002)
• the picture is still (2001)
• ghost... a border act (2000)
• myein (1999)
• mattering (1997)
• lineament (1994)
• tropos (1994)
• indigo blue (1991)
• privation and excesses (1989)
• still life (1988)
• The permanent installation Floor of Babble in the new Seattle Public Library building

External links

• Ann Hamilton's Ann Hamilton web site
• Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century Season 1 (2001).
• In 2006, Gregory R. Miller & Co. published Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects (text by Joan Simon).
• Gund Art Foundation Fellows 2007
• United States Artists Arts Advocacy Organization.
• Article and streaming video of Ann Hamilton and her tower at the Oliver Ranch, from KQED Spark.
• Ann Hamilton at Gemini GEL, Los Angeles
• The Heinz Awards, Ann Hamilton profile
• Ann Hamilton's interview with Robert Ayers, February 2009