Sam Durant

Sam Durant is an interdisciplinary artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. His methodology is research based but with an emphasis on social engagement, often working with communities and groups in collaborative and performative formations. Growing up near Boston, MA in the 1970’s he experienced the radical pedagogy of A.S. Neill, Maria Montessori, John Holt, anti-war demonstrations and the desegregation of the public school system. Exposure to an educational culture emphasizing democratic ideals, racial equality and social justice created the foundation for Durant’s artistic perspective. Often taking up forgotten events from the past, his works make connections with present and ongoing social and cultural issues. Durant’s interest in monuments and memorials began with Proposal for Monument at Altamont Raceway (1999), continued notably with Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions (2005) that recontextualizes memorials to victims of the conquest of North America, and more recently with Proposal for Public Fountain (2015), a marble work depicting an anarchist statue being blasted by a police water canon. Earlier works have excavated subjects as diverse as modernism’s repressive energy, the death drive beneath 1960’s-70’s pop music and artist Robert Smithson’s theories of entropy. More recent work has encompassed Italian anarchism, cartographic histories of capitalism, gestures of everyday refusal and an ongoing series of projects based on the Non-Aligned Movement. He has recently done major public art projects, Labyrinth (2015) in Philadelphia which addressed mass incarceration and The Meeting House (2016) in Concord, MA that took up the subject of race in colonial and contemporary New England. His most recent public work Untitled (drone) is the second commission for the High Line Plinth in New York and will be in view until 2022. It raises the issues of drone warfare and surveillance in American society.

B. 1961 in Seattle, Washington; lives and works in Berlin, Germany.