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Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.

Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.

In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.

Installation new media

Sarah Sze: Contemporary American Installation Artist

April 12, 2013

I’m trying to remember how I found out about Sarah Sze. I’m pretty sure it was from my Women in Art History class last semester. I did a search for “women installation artists”  and was like, whoa, how come I hadn’t heard about her already? Likely answer: I’m a newbie art undergrad. She’s pretty famous.
Sarah Sze is an American artist, born in 1969, works and lives in New York, has a BA from Yale in 1991 and an MFA from the School of the Visual Arts (1997). Her resume reads like an artist’s fantasy. She shows internationally constantly and has her work in many galleries and museums all over the place (see bottom of article). Probably one of the most unique locations is on the High Line in New York City, which Anna, Peter & I had the pleasure of visiting last year. The photo below, though, is from an exhibit in Brazil.

SarahSze-0191_09Photo: Sarah Sze “Everything In the Right Place” 2002, Brazil Bienal

Her work is fun, whimsical, and uses everyday objects, plants, fans… she runs the gamut in her materials. Her works seem to stretch through the spaces where they are installed, with many points of interest and activity. I really like her use of line, shape, and color. Her work makes me feel like I am at a birthday party – it is happy, exuberant, and pulling together many elements of life.  In the Art in America Magazine article linked below, she says, “I’m interested in painting, sculpture, photography, architecture—bleeding them together in a practice that’s inextricable for me.” It’s always interesting to read interviews with artists, rather than read articles written about them. Art criticism is rarely done well (read: boring), and as I look through different articles, it’s clear they often rip each other off trying to come up with something to say that doesn’t venture too far from the norm.
Soooo – with that in mind, I may vote to shut up now and let you look at her work for yourself and read an article where she is interviewed.
Links:
http://www.sarahsze.com/
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/conversations/2012-10-12/sarah-sze-high-museum/
Museum Collections:
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Guggenheim Museum, New York
The New Museum, New York
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, San Diego, CA
Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI
Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
Cartier Foundation, Paris, France
21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, Japan
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Fogg Museum of Art, Boston, MA
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Chicago, IL
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Recent posts
Seven Survivors
Animation/Storytelling workshop in Hiroshima
©Peter Bill 2020