Judy Fiskin

Judy Fiskin (b. April 1 1945, Chicago) is a Los Angeles artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Biography

Judy Fiskin grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Pomona College, where her classmates included future artists Chris Burden and James Turrell. She got a Master's degree in art history at UCLA, compiled and edited the journals of Richard Neutra, and was co-director of Womanspace Gallery in the mid-1970s. She started teaching photography in the art school at Cal Arts in 1977. In addition to her photography and video, she's also an award-winning writer for her essay "Borges, Stryker, Evans: The Sorrows of Representation," published originally in the photography journal Views in 1988, reprinted in" Multiple Views: Logan Grant Essays on Photography", published by University of New Mexico Press in 1991.

Photography

Since her first show at Castelli Graphics in New York City in 1976, Fiskin's photographs have had the same distinctive format: small black-and-white images, two and one-half inches square, printed on letter-sized white paper. She began with vernacular architecture in Los Angeles and gained critical attention for her "Dingbat" series, anonymous small 1950s apartment buildings in Los Angeles shot from across the street in a deadpan style. Other series focused on desert scenes, military buildings, and period furniture. In 1992, MOCA in Los Angeles held a mid-career retrospective for Fiskin; critics praised the intelligence, wit, and stylistic coherence of her work. Her photographs have been exhibited widely, most recently in 2006 when the Pompidou Center in Paris displayed 24 prints as part of their historic exhibit, "Los Angeles 1955-1985, Birth of an Art Capital."

Video

Fiskin began making video in 1998 with "Diary of a Midlife Crisis," a serio-comic video diary about a middle-aged photographer whose fear of moving the video camera provided a metaphor for her feeling of being creatively at a standstill. The video won awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival and at Worldfest Houston, and was screened at MOCA in Los Angeles, and in Bonn, Kassel, and Brisbane, among other places. Critical acclaim for that work led the J. Paul Getty Museum to commission the video installation "My Getty Center" in 2000 [J. Paul Getty Museum. [http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/past/departures/index.htm Departures: 11 artists at the Getty. Judy Fiskin. "My Getty Center".] Retrieved August 29, 2008.] , another comic personal video diary that chronicled the opening of the new Getty Center in Los Angeles. LACMA commissioned "What We Think About When We Think About Ships," a video installation at LACMALab based on a painting in its collection. Her 2003 video "50 Ways to Set the Table" documented the competition in table setting at the Los Angeles County Fair -- a metaphor for the creative process and the work of the critic. [see Jan Tumlir, "Judy Fiskin," Artforum, April, 2004, p. 265] That video has been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, at the Berkeley Film and Video Festival and at Angles Gallery, Santa Monica. In 2007, her new video, "The End of Photography," a three-minute elegy for the darkroom, was exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Kassel, and at Angles Gallery in Santa Monica. "Like all great works of art," David Pagel wrote in a review in the Los Angeles Times, the video "tells more than one story." [David Pagel, "Farewell to an Art, Farewell to an Era," Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2007, E20 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-galleries13apr13,1,3232222.story]

Notes

Artist's Books, Exhibition Catalogues and Monographs

Catherine Grenier, ed., "Los Angeles 1955 - 1985: Birth of an Art Capital." exhibition catalog from the Centre Pompidou, 2006, pp. 251, 290-291.

Judy Fiskin," Some More Art." Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1992.

William Bartman, ed., "Judy Fiskin". A.R.T. Press, Los Angeles, 1988. Essay by Christopher Knight. Interview with John Divola. 26 reproductions of work from 1973-1988.

Judy Fiskin and Dick Barnes, "Thirty-one Views of San Bernardino". Los Angeles: Spectator Press, Pomona College, 1975

External links

* [http://www.judyfiskin.com/index.shtml Judy Fiskin Official Website]
* [http://www.judyfiskin.com/press/artforum_2004.html 2004 ArtForum review by Jan Tumir]
* [http://www.judyfiskin.com/press/divola_interview.html Judy Fiskin interviewed by John Divola]
* [http://calarts.org/schools/art/faculty/fiskin.html Judy Fiskin Cal Arts page]