Kerry Tribe (born 1973) is an American visual artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles.McQuaid, Cate. "Kerry Tribe uses language as a medium in ‘Onomatopoeia,’" The Boston Globe, February 17, 2022. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Womack, Catherine. "A New Project Lets Viewers Explore All 51 Miles of the L.A. River in 51 Minutes," LA Weekly, July 11, 2016. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Her work includes video, film and sound installations, sculpture, performance, drawing and photography.Herbert, Martin. "Kerry Tribe," Frieze, September 2009. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Madden, Kathleen. "Kerry Tribe," Artforum, June 2011. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Diehl, Travis. "Kerry Tribe," Artforum, April 2015. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Tribe's art investigates subjective aspects of consciousness such as memory, language, cognition, and empathy through subjects including medical conditions and clinical training, historical incidents, and collective and personal experience.Zimbardo, Tanya. "New Work: Kerry Tribe," San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, October 2017. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Knight, Christopher. "Pulling back for the big picture of media overload," Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2015. Retrieved May 27, 2025.
Tribe's work belongs to the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Kerry Tribe, Collections. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),Museum of Modern Art. Kerry Tribe, Artists. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum. Kerry Tribe, Artists. Retrieved May 27, 2025. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Kerry Tribe, Artists. Retrieved May 27, 2025. and Hammer Museum,Artadia. Kerry Tribe, Artists, 2005. Retrieved May 27, 2025. among others. She has exhibited at the latter four institutions,Schwendener, Martha. "Phanstasms of an Analog Twilight," The New York Times, January 2, 2014. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Cotter, Holland. "At a Biennial On a Budget, Tweaking And Provoking," The New York Times, February 26, 2010. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Hammer Museum. "All of this and nothing," Exhibitions, 2011. Retrieved May 27, 2025. and others including The Power Plant, the High Line in New York and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.Adler, Dan. "Kerry Tribe: Power Plant," Frieze, September 2012.The High Line. "Kerry Tribe," Projects, 2018. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. "Kerry Tribe: Telling Tales," Exhibitions, 2016. Retrieved May 27, 2025. In 2017, she received the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for film and video.Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Artists, 2017. Retrieved May 27, 2025.
Life and career Tribe was born in Boston and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father is the legal scholar Laurence Tribe and her mother is Carolyn Kreye Tribe; new media artist Mark Tribe is her brother.NYU Annual Survey of American Law. "2002 Dedication - Laurence H. Tribe," April 15, 2002. Retrieved May 27, 2025. She studied art and semiotics at Brown University, completing a B.A. degree in 1997, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program the following year. In 1999, she moved to Los Angeles, where she studied with conceptual artists John Baldessari and Mary Kelly at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and earned an M.F.A. in 2002.Finkel, Jori. "John Baldessari, Who Gave Conceptual Art a Dose of Wit, Is Dead at 88", The New York Times, January 5, 2020. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Kelly, Mary. Mary Kelly's Concentric Pedagogy, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. Retrieved May 27, 2025.
In her early career, Tribe exhibited in group shows at SculptureCenter,SculptureCenter. Kerry Tribe, Artists. Retrieved May 27, 2025. the New Museum,Johnson, Ken. "Adaptive Behavior, New Museum of Contemporary Art", The New York Times, October 8, 2004. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Orange County Museum of ArtKnight, Christopher. "Biennial arrives, and so does a museum," Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2004. Retrieved May 27, 2025. and Hirshhorn MuseumRosenberg, Karen. "Now You Perceive It, Now You Think You Do,", The New York Times, August 22, 2008. Retrieved May 27, 2025. and solo shows at LACE (2003), Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2006) and 1301PE (2009, Los Angeles), among others.Knight, Christopher. Review: LACE, Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2003. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Taft, Catherine. "Kerry Tribe, H.M., Art Review, Summer 2009. In 2010, she was selected for the Whitney Biennial.Martínez, Chus. "Whitney Biennial," Artforum, May 2010. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Subsequent solo exhibitions took place at venues including Camden Arts Centre (2011),Sherwin, Skye. "Artist of the week 139: Kerry Tribe," The Guardian, May 19, 2011. Retrieved May 27, 2025. The Power Plant (2012), Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane, 2014),Institute of Modern Art. "Kerry Tribe: There Will Be _______," Exhibitions, 2014. Retrieved May 27, 2025. SFMOMA (2017) and the Wellcome Collection (2021).Wellcome Collection. "Standardized Patient," Exhibitions, 2021. Retrieved May 27, 2025. She has had performances and film screenings at Tate Modern, MoMA, Walker Art Center, Getty Center and the New York, London and Rotterdam film festivals.Tate. Kerry Tribe, Critical Mass, Performances. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Walker Art Center. Kerry Tribe. Retrieved May 27, 2025.
Tribe has taught at Art Center College of Design and UCLA and been a visiting faculty member at CalArts, Harvard University and Stanford University.Generali Foundation Collection. Kerry Tribe, Here & Elsewhere, 2004, Artworks. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Stanford Arts Institute. "Presidential Visiting Artist 2018º19: Kerry Tribe,". Retrieved May 27, 2025. She is married to artist Mungo Thomson.Berardini, Andrew. "Tourist Trap," Artforum, April 7, 2009. Retrieved May 27, 2025.
Work and reception Tribe employs both fictive and documentary methods—for example, performance, testimonial, investigation and research—in her projects.Zellen, Jody. "Kerry Tribe," Artillery, February 7, 2013. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Cozzi, Leslie. "Metaphor to Métier: Kerry Tribe’s 'Aphasia Poetry Club' and the Discourse of Disability in Contemporary Art," MDPI Arts, April 2020. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Her approach often involves establishing collaborative dialogues and relationships with individuals across disciplines and communities including support groups, medical personnel, actors and scientists.Watson, SJ. "Art, Identity and the world’s most famous amnesiac," The Guardian, April 4, 2016. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Cheh, Carol. "On the Concrete Banks of the L.A. River: Kerry Tribe's Exquisite Corpse," Art21 Magazine, September 14, 2016. Retrieved May 27, 2025. While her projects largely arise out of subjects of interest to her—as with documentary works—they exhibit elements of artifice and fantasy, often using actors in unconventional ways to re-enact personal experiences, portray historical figures or embody social roles.Heidenry, Rachel. "Empathy in Training: Kerry Tribe's Standardized Patient," Art21 Magazine, December 13, 2017. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Critics such as Martin Herbert suggest that rather than use film as a documentary tool, for Tribe it serves "a countermanding conception of unknowing and unraveling," in which notions of truth, recall, history and scientific rigor falter in the face of subjectivity.Teasdale, Paul. "Kerry Tribe," Frieze, October 2010. Retrieved May 27, 2025.
Tribe's films and videos have screened independently and been exhibited as larger installations in conjunction with related photographs, works on paper and sculpture. Commentators identify her attention to the apparatus and form of various media and use of layering—of imagery, means of expression, objects or meanings—as hallmarks of Tribe's practice. The structure of individual works often arise out of the content; in various installations, she used the physical mechanics of cinematic projection or sound output to mirror cognitive processes that were being examined.Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. " Image and Amnesia with Kerry Tribe," Event, 2018. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Of the work's layering, Dan Adler wrote, "The value of much of Tribe’s oeuvre resides in the provocative and profound staging of relationships—between isolated words, textures, or objects on the one hand, and coherent narrative elements on the other—reflecting the subjective processes of memory and desire, and their susceptibility to a host of personal and societal pressures, including the ideological notion that there is one definitive version of the truth."
Early projects (2000–08) Tribe's early work recreated personal experiences and recorded performative acts that posited memory and perception as fundamentally troubled processes subject to time, language and representation. For The Audition Tapes (1998) she filmed 15 actors delivering monologues and dialogues developed from transcribed interviews with four members of her immediate family about family history; the divergent accounts and exposed production seams (false starts and takes) pointed to the uncertainty of narrative conveyance and memory itself. She created a hazy autobiographical portrait in Double (2000), filming varied interpretations of her persona by actors she hired that resembled her. The split-screen work Here & Elsewhere (2002) considered the intersection between consciousness and exteriority—represented and real—through the thoughtful responses of a 10-year-old girl to philosophical questions about existence, space and time.
In other works, she engaged strangers in performative situations that revealed the subjectivity embedded in common experience. The silent, black-and-white film installation Untitled (Potential Terrorist) (2002) explored stereotyping and suspicion while paying homage to Warhol with a series of one-minute casting-call screen tests by 29 actors asked to project the demeanor of a terrorist.Stamets, Bill. "Kerry Tribe," Chicago Reader, April 17, 2003. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Robbins, Miranda. "Kerry Tribe," Flash Art, January–February 2006, p. 68.Harris, Mark. "Age of Terror: Art since 9/11," Artforum, October 2018. Retrieved May 27, 2025. The book North Is West/South Is East (2002) delved into subjective perceptions of Los Angeles through a series of hand-drawn, often humorously inaccurate thumbnail memory-maps that Tribe solicited from visitors and locals at LAX Airport.Myers, Holly. "The city of L.A., gauzy but familiar," Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2004. Retrieved May 27, 2025.Holte, Michael Ned. "Kerry Tribe," Artforum, Summer 2009. Retrieved May 27, 2025.
Projects, 2009–present In later work, Tribe drew more directly upon the investigative impulse of documentary, considering the shifting nature of memory and its role in conceptions of the self, science and history. Her two-channel film installation H.M. (2009) focused on the well-known medical case of "Patient H.M.," a man who underwent experimental brain surgery for epilepsy in 1953 and was left with an episodic memory capacity lasting approximately twenty seconds. The subject of an exhaustive MIT study, his case is the source of much current knowledge about the physical basis of memory.Hudson, Suzanne. "A Very, Very Long Cat," Artforum, April 2010. Retrieved May 27, 2025. Tribe recounted his story through layered interview fragments and photographs (ultimately revealed to be dramatizations), historical stills, stock and on-location footage, animation and text.Neel, Tucker. "Kerry Tribe," Artlies, Summer 2009. In order to evoke H.M.'s condition, she looped a single strand of 16 mm film through two adjacent projectors with a twenty-second delay between them, creating for viewers a concrete experience of the cognitive dissonance of amnesia and the fragility of all memory.