Premier American contemporary artist Ann Hamilton schedules presentation at UH Manoa Art Auditorium

Ann Hamilton, one of the premier American contemporary visual artists of our time, will be on the UH Manoa campus next week as a part of the spring semester Distinguished Visiting Scholars in the Liberal Arts Program.

She will survey her work over the last 15 years in a lecture presentation on Tuesday, March 21, at the UH Manoa Art Building Auditorium beginning at 7:30 p.m. in a program entitled "By Mouth and Hand."

A performing presence has been a part of Hamilton‘s sculptural practice since her first installation in graduate school in 1984 in which she offered herself in a stilled posture wearing a bristling suit of painted toothpicks that became her animate skin. She has collaborated in theater and dance performances and won a Bessie award in the creator category. In 2000 she collaborated with Meredith Monk exploring her long-term interest in voice and uttered sound. Her most recent works, using a mouth-held pinhole camera, address the very edge of inside and out, just as her room-sized installations treat their planar linings as permeable membrane.

"Ann Hamilton‘s art works are incredibly imaginative," said UH Manoa professor of Art and Art History. "We are so fortunate to be able to host her on campus, and I am certain that her audience will be challenged and enriched by her visual thinking."

A program description from the art department says:
"The genesis of Ann Hamilton‘s large-scale site responsive installation work often begins in the body scaled gestures of speech and touch and the formative acts of uttering a sound by mouth or shaping a word by hand. In this lecture Hamilton will explore how these two gestures have formed and transformed her practice and approach to architectural space."


Hamilton has received wide critical acclaim and has won numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, NEA fellowships and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship. She represented the United States in 1999 at the Venice Biennale and in 1991 at the Sao Paolo Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at major museums throughout the world.