Helen Mirra is an American conceptual artist. " ike Henry David Thoreau, she is amaximalist in a minimalist robe", with an idiosyncratic practice. She is engaged with ideas common to buddhist and pragmatist philosophies, and since 2008 her art practice has been integrated with walking. She has said of walking: "It is an unskilled activity, and a modest activity, and a free activity, and an always-available activity, and an equipment-free activity, and an active activity." In an essay on Mirra's work, Yukio Lippit described her engagement thus: "Mirra’s practice champions walking as a specific form of thinking that bypasses language. Indeed, one senses that she shares with Zen Buddhists in particular a deep skepticism towards language as an authentic mechanism of discovery." At the same time, she has often worked with language as a primary material.

Career

Helen Mirra has worked in diverse media including weaving, writing - particularly indexes, experimental music, sculpture, 16mm film, and video. "Environmental belonging" has been a persistent theme, while keeping within a restricted palette. Her first solo gallery exhibition was in Chicago in 1999 and included a 16mm silent film, textile works, and the vinyl record ''Along, Below'', all relating to geography, and her first one-person institutional exhibition, ''Sky-wreck'', at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 2001, was a indigo-dyed textile sculpture of a section of the sky, imagined as part of a geodesic structure. In addition to

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...

, Stanley Brouwn, André Cadere, and

Douglas Huebler Douglas Huebler (October 27, 1924 – July 12, 1997) was an American conceptual artist. Life and career Douglas Huebler grew up in rural Michigan during the Depression and served in the Marines in World War II. After the war, funded by the ...

are key influences. She has an extensive exhibition history in North and South America, Europe, and Japan, and participated in broad international exhibitions such as the 11th Havana Bienal, the 30th

São Paulo Art Biennial The São Paulo Art Biennial (Portuguese: ''Bienal de São Paulo'') was founded in 1951 and has been held every two years since. It is the second oldest art biennial in the world after the Venice Biennale (in existence since 1895), which serves as ...

and the 50th

Venice Biennial The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

. A fifteen-year (1995-2009) survey of her work
''Edge Habitat''
, was presented in 2014 at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal, and the corresponding publication ''Edge Habitat Materials'' was published by WhiteWalls. She was a Senior Lecturer in Visual Art and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago (2001-2005) and a Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University until 2013. She has been an artist-in-residence at University of California at Berkeley, and a guest of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. She lives in Northern California.

Selected solo exhibitions

''Sky-wreck''
Renaissance Society, 2001 *''Declining Interval Lands'', Whitney Museum of American Art, 2002 *
65 Instants
'', MATRIX 209, Berkeley Art Museum, 2003 *
Gehend
', Bonner Kunstverein, KW Institute of Contemporary Art Berlin, and Haus Kontruktiv, Zurich, 2011-2012 *
Hourly Directional
' with Ernst Karel, MIT List Center, 2014 *
Hourly Directional
'', Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, 2014 *
Edge Habitat
', Culturgest, Lisbon Portugal, 2014 *''Waulked,'' Peter Freeman Inc., New York, 2014 *''Helen Mirra'', Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 2015
*
Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 2018 *''la malplena ĉambro estas bela'', Large Glass, London, 2020

References

External links

artist's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mirra, Helen 1970 births American conceptual artists Walking artists Bennington College alumni University of Illinois Chicago alumni Harvard University faculty University of Chicago faculty MacDowell Colony fellows Living people Women conceptual artists 21st-century American women artists American women academics