Mary Lucier


Mary Lucier is an American video artist. Concentrating primarily on video and installation since 1973, she has produced numerous multiple- and single-channel pieces.

Career

Lucier began working in film in the 1970s after receiving her B.A. from Brandeis University. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst in Karlsruhe, Germany, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI.
In the 1960s Lucier was married to composer Alvin Lucier and toured with him as a member of the Sonic Arts Union. She is currently married to the painter and arts writer Robert Berlind, with whom she resides in New York.
In the Late 1960's and the early 1970's, Lucier produced numerous conceptional video and photo works, including Polaroid Image Series and Media Sculptures: Maps of Space. In the 1980s, she created visual narratives that studies about the nature and urban landscape as a medium of perception and memory. In 1990s and beyond, Lucier also integrated elements of nature, dance, and language to her work to explore accountability, strength, and vulnerability.
Some of her beginnings with video include, The Occasion of Her First Dance and How She Looked and also another work titled, Antique, both of which are from 1973.
Lucier has been a visiting lecturer of art history at UC Davis and a visiting professor of Film and Video at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She has also taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art, at New York University, at the Minnesota College of Art and Design, at the San Francisco Art Institute, and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I

Recognition

In the past 30 years, Lucier has been the recipient of grants, awards, and commissions from public and private foundations including Creative Capital, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Film Institute, the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Anonymous Was A Woman, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. In 2007 she received the Skowhegan Medal for Video for outstanding work in the field. In 2010 she won a United States Artists Fellow award.
Mary Lucier has presented solo exhibitions at different venues all around the world. Among those are The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the TV Gallery in Moscow, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York, and the Media Test Wall at MIT.