Janet Biggs

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Janet Biggs
Born 1959
Nationality American
Field Video Art, Photography, Performance Art
Training Moore College of Art and Design, Rhode Island School of Design


Janet Biggs is an American artist, known for her work in video, photography and performance art. Biggs lives and works in New York City.

Biggs' video works often include images of individuals engaged in obsessive and extreme activities. She has worked with miners underground, champion wrestlers, speed-obsessed bikers, synchronized swimmers, arctic explorers, sulfur miners inside an active volcano, and camel herders in the Taklamakan desert. Her earlier video work dealt with issues of psychosis and psychotropic drugs.

In addition to videos, her recent work includes multi-discipline performances, often including multiple large-scale videos, live musicians, and athletes.

The Tampa Museum of Art presented a survey of Biggs' work in 2011. Biggs' video work has been recently presented at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, DC), Glaskasten Marl Sculpture Museum (Marl, Germany), the Mint Museum (Charlotte NC), the Gibbes Museum of Art (Charlotte, NC), the McNay Museum (San Antonio, Texas), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, NY), Videonale 13 (Bonn, Germany) and tbe Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Tampa Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, and The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut.

Biggs is represented by CONNERSMITH (Washington, DC), and Galerie Anita Beckers/blink video (Frankfurt, Germany). In 2014 Biggs will participate in the First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartegena de Indias.

Biggs' recent work has taken her inside a volcano in Indonesia, where she filmed sulfur minors for "A Step on the Sun," and to the Taklamakan Desert in western China, where she spent a week on camel to film "Point of No Return." "A Step on the Sun" was premiered in a solo screening at the 2013 Armory Art Fair in New York City.

Biggs travelled to the far Arctic in 2009-2010, where she captured images of individuals' interaction with extremes environments above and below the ice. Biggs used this footage to create three videos, "The Arctic Trilogy." These videos were premiered at Ed Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea (New York City) in February 2011. This show was reviewed in the New York Times by Holland Carter.[1]

In 2013 Biggs was awarded a la Napoule Art Foundation Riviera Residency, and in 2009 and 2010 she was selected for The Arctic Circle High Arctic Expedition residency. She received an Art Matters Project grant in 2010. Janet Biggs was a recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts grant in 2011 and 2009 through the New York Experimental Television Center. She has received additional funding grants from Art Matters, the Arts and Science Council of Charlotte, and the Goodrich Foundation. In 2004 she received the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship,[2] and received a painting fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989.

Biggs was commissioned by Puma to create a short film as part of their 2012 Films4Peace initiative.[3]

On July 14, 2009, Vanishing Point was screened at New York's River To River Festival. That same evening, Biggs' videos accompanied an ambient performance by Anthony Gonzalez of the band M83.

Contemporary Magazine profiled Janet Biggs in their March 2007 issue, and one of her photographs was used as the cover of Spot magazine's Summer 2007 issue.

In 2006, Hermès commissioned Biggs to create a new work of art for their flagship New York store. Biggs installed 11 large monitors in the store's Madison Avenue windows, as well as photographs of equestrian-themed images.

Selected bibliography

Reviews of Biggs' work have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, ArtForum, ARTNews, Art in America, Flash Art, Artnet.com, and many others.

References

  1. ↑ Carter, Holland (February 18, 2011). "JANET BIGGS: ‘The Arctic Trilogy’". New York Times. pp. C29. Retrieved 2011-02-18. 
  2. ↑ "Anonymous Was a Woman Awards 10 Women Artists with $25,000 Grants". Absolute Arts. January 11, 2005. Retrieved 2008-01-19. 
  3. ↑ "JANET BIGGS / Films for Peace". 

External links

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