Carolyn Porter

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Carolyn Porter (b. 1974) is an American artist who lives and works in Austin, Texas.

She works in a number of media including installation art, sculpture, and photography. Her art is conceptually oriented, and is generally concerned with issues of museology, stolen art, and the role of fine art in popular culture.

Identified in 1988 as one of the top young artists in the country by the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, her work has appeared internationally in gallery and museum exhibitions. Her work resides in many prominent museum collections nationally and internationally.

Porter received her B.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2001, after a period in New York City and Boston, Porter joined the University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History in 2001. She has taught at the Worcester Museum of Art, Boston University, Harvard University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Rather than create beautiful objects to be exhibited on a gallery wall, Porter locates her art outside the frame, in the marginal "non-art" places of a museum or gallery. Porter’s subject is the processes and politics of the art institution, and she seeks to make artistic interventions—with the collaboration and cooperation of the arts organizations themselves—that demystify the art world. She has written, "Museums and galleries are, by definition, selective and exclusive due to many elements, including space, finances, availability of works, and biases of the organizers. The totality and comprehensiveness which many art exhibitions claim to represent is a fiction and even a fantasy."

Porter prefers to insert herself "behind the scenes", working with areas of institutions that are usually less visible to visitors, including public relations offices, museum stores, and areas devoted to security. Her work falls somewhere between interactive installation and public art, and is akin to that of such project-based artists as Mel Chin, Hans Haake, Barbara Kruger, Mierle Ukeles, and Julia Sher.

—Dana Friis-Hansen, 22 to Watch: New Art in Austin