Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Eleanor Antin Lecture!

ELEANOR ANTIN
B1 Meyerson Hall

Lecture Series event featuring performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist Eleanor Antin

Hosted by the Department of Fine Arts

Supported by the Spiegel Fund

Plaisir d’Amour (after Couture)

Eleanor Antin was born in New York City in 1935. An influential performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist, Antin delves into history as a way to explore the present. Antin is a cultural chameleon, masquerading in theatrical or stage roles to expose her many selves. Her most famous persona is that of Eleanora Antinova, the tragically overlooked black ballerina of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Appearing as Antinova in scripted and non-scripted performances for over a decade, Antin has blurred the distinction between her identity and that of her character. In her 2001 series The Last Days of Pompeii, Antin lingers behind the camera to stage the final, catastrophic days of Pompeii in the affluent hills of La Jolla, California. Eleanor Antin received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1997 and a Media Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in 1998. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including an award-winning retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1999. This lecture is a Speigel Distinguished Artist Lecture Series.