Athena Tacha


Athena Tacha, is a multimedia visual artist. She is best known for her work in the fields of environmental public sculpture and conceptual art. She also worked in a wide array of materials including stone, brick, steel, water, plants, and L.E.D. lighting. photography, film, and artists’ books. Tacha's work focused on personal narratives, and often plays with geometry and form.

Early life, education, and academic career

Tacha was born in 1936 in Greece. She received an M.A. in sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece ; an M.A. in art history from Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio ; and a Doctorate in aesthetics from the Sorbonne in Paris. After her studies, she worked as the curator of modern art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College, organizing contemporary art exhibitions. She has published two books and various articles on Auguste Rodin, Brâncuși, Nadelman and other 20th-century sculptors. From 1973 to 2000, she was a professor of sculpture at Oberlin College. Since 1998, she has been an affiliate of the University of Maryland, College Park, and lives in Washington, DC.

Artwork

One of the first artists to develop environmental site-specific sculpture in the early 1970s, Tacha has won over fifty competitions for permanent public art commissions, of which nearly forty have been executed throughout the U.S. One of these public works was a two-acre sculptural landscape in downtown Philadelphia, Pennsylvania entitled "Connections." She has had six one-artist shows in New York—at the Zabriskie Gallery, the Max Hutchinson Gallery, Franklin Furnace, the Foundation for Hellenic Studies, and the Kouros Gallery—and has exhibited in numerous group shows throughout the world, including the Venice Biennale. She produced a body of textual and photographic conceptual works and poetic studies, many of which were published as artist's books.
Athena Tacha's artist books were printed between 1970 and 2005. An interactive online display of the artist books and other printed materials can be found at Printed Matter, Inc.The pocket books series are small folded books, similar to a zine that were often sold in a plastic sleeve. In The Way My Mind Works, Tacha writes about her schizophrenic mind, her ruminating mind, her orderly mind. Others in the pocket series examine everyday life. The larger artist books focus on geometry, space, and minimalism. A Dictionary of Steps displays diagrams of steps. In addition, Tacha explored self portraiture, in works like Gestures and Expressions.

Exhibitions

In 1989, a retrospective of more than 100 of Tacha's sculptures, drawings and conceptual photographic pieces was held at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. It included large color photographs of her executed commissions and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, Athena Tacha: Public Works, 1970-88. The same year, she had an exhibition of new work, over 50 sculptures and drawings, as well as two large temporary installations, at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, also accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog. Her most recent museum solo show, Small Wonders: New Sculpture and Photoworks at the American University's Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC, 2006, had a fully illustrated catalog with essays by Anne Ellegood and Brenda Brown. Since Tacha moved to Washington, DC, she has had two solo exhibitions at the Marsha Mateyka Gallery.
A 40-year retrospective, "Athena Tacha: From the Public to the Private," opened at the Contemporary Art Center in Thessaloniki, Greece, Jan. 16 - April 11, 2010. It presents for the first time all aspects of Tacha's art—from large outdoor commissions, to "body sculptures" and photoworks, to conceptual art and films—with a bilingual catalog. It is scheduled travel to Larissa and Athens through 2010.
Tacha's sculptures and photo-works are in many American museums and private collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Agnes Gund Collection.

Latest executed commissions (2001–09)

Books on Tacha's work:
Main solo exhibition catalogs:
Several of Tacha's New York exhibitions have illustrated catalogues -- Massacre Memorials, with an essay by Lucy Lippard; Vulnerability: New Fashions, a conceptual art piece critiquing the fashion industry; and Athena Tacha: Shields and Universes.
The most extensive articles on Tacha's art have appeared in Landscape Architecture, Artforum, Arts Magazine, Art News and Sculpture.