Suzanne Anker (born August 6, 1946) is an American visual artist and theorist. Considered a pioneer in bioart, she has been working on the relationship of art and the biological sciences for more than twenty five years. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, her work calls attention to the beauty of life and the "necessity for enlightened thinking about nature's 'tangled bank'." Anker frequently assembles with "pre-defined and found materials" botanical specimens, medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatus, microscopic images and geological specimens.
Biography
Life and education Suzanne Anker was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 6, 1946. She earned a B.A. in Art from Brooklyn College of the City of New York and an M.F.A. from the University of Colorado in Boulder (1976). She also completed independent Studies with Ad Reinhardt (1966-1967) and studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School (1968). She lives with the artist Frank Gillette in Manhattan and East Hampton, NY. Her choice of graduate school was determined by the fact that her first husband, Jeffrey Anker, M.D. was relieved of his duties to serve in the Vietnam War and instead work as a prison psychiatrist under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service. It was in Colorado that Anker was introduced to the scale of nature and its temporal aspects.
Paper reliefs and early sculptures During the mid 70s to the mid 80s, Anker worked almost exclusively on sculptural handmade paper reliefs. She started papermaking in 1974 on the basis of reading Dard Hunter's and Claire Romano's books. In 1975 she worked with Garner Tullis at the Institute of Experimental Printmaking in Santa Cruz, California. The paper reliefs produced at his institute were exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City in 1976. The same year, she participated in the North American Hand Papermaking exhibition organized by Richard Minsky at the Center for Book Arts in New York City.
From a background as a printmaker, Anker initially worked with cast paper, made in latex molds. Subsequently, she incorporated limestone and fossils in her experiment with combinations of paper and stone. For her 1979 solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Anker installed large limestone planks that extended from the interior to the exterior of the gallery. The same year, she presented an installation of limestone and its residual chalk dust at P.S. 1's "A Great Big Drawing Show" curated by Alanna Heiss with artists Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, Frank Gillette, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, and others.
Bioart pioneer Suzanne Anker is considered "one of the pioneers in the broader field of art, science, and technology", particularly in the burgeoning field of bioart. Bioart is a practice that utilizes living organisms and life processes as an artistic medium. Her work Gene Pool (1991) was featured in the 1992 article "The Consumption of Paradise" by Peggy Cyphers.
In 1994, Suzanne Anker curated Gene Culture: Molecular Metaphor in Visual Art – one of the first art exhibitions on the subject of art and genetics – at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus in New York. The exhibition investigated "the ways in which genetic imaging operates as aesthetic signs".
Her sculpture Cyber-chrome Chromosome from 1991 was included in the exhibition From Code to Commodity: Genetics and Visual Art at the New York Academy of Sciences in 2003.
From 2004 to 2006, Suzanne Anker hosted twenty episodes of the Bio-Blurb Show, a 30-minute-long internet radio program originally broadcast on WPS1 Art Radio, in collaboration with MoMA. The show focused on the intersection of art and the biological sciences, and the ethical and aesthetic dimensions therein. It is currently archived on Alanna Heiss' Clocktower Productions.
In 2006, Anker co-curated the exhibition Neuroculture: Visual Art and the Brain, at the Westport Arts Center with Giovanni Frazzetto. The exhibition presented an investigation of aspects of the human brain, and its attendant representations.
Suzanne Anker curated the exhibition Fundamentally human: contemporary art and neuroscience at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2011.
Academic career
School of Visual Arts (SVA NYC) Suzanne Anker is the Chair of the School of Visual Arts (SVA)'s BFA Fine Arts Department in New York City (2005–present). She previously chaired the SVA BFA Art History Department (2000-2005). In 2011, Anker founded the SVA Bio Art Lab, the first Bio Art laboratory in a Fine Arts Department in the United States. The SVA Bio Art Lab is located in Chelsea, New York City and has been conceived as a place where "scientific tools and techniques become methodologies in art practice".
Art / Knowledge / Theory Book Series Art / Knowledge / Theory is a book series that explores artistic modes of expression as forms of knowledge production. Co-edited by Suzanne Anker and Sabine Flach and published by Peter Lang since 2013, "it focuses on transdisciplinary, epistemological and methodological approaches to contemporary art. Linking artistic and scientific practices, tools, techniques, and theories, the volumes investigate the cultures of aesthetics and science studies as they relate to works of art".
Published titles include:
Embodied Fantasies: From Awe to Artifice (2013). Suzanne Anker, Sabine Flach (eds). The Glass Veil: Seven Adventures in Wonderland (2015). Suzanne Anker, Sabine Flach. Senses of Embodiment: Arts, Technics, Media (2014). Mika Elo, Miika Luoto (eds). Naturally Hypernatural I: Concepts of Nature (2016). Suzanne Anker, Sabine Flach (eds). Naturally Hypernatural III: Hypernatural Landscapes in the Anthropocene (2016). Sabine Flach, Gary Sherman (eds). Axis of Observation I: Frank Gillette (2018). Suzanne Anker, Sabine Flach (eds).
Notable authored publications
The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age Anker co-authored The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age with the American sociologist of science Dorothy Nelkin. The publication examines the intersections between art and science in the developing arena of genetic research and engineering, focusing on the ethical and social issues that the genetic revolution poses on popular culture and visual arts. It was published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press (associated with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where James Watson –the co-discoverer of DNA– was director).
Visual Culture and Bioscience: Issues in Cultural Theory In 2008 Suzanne Anker co-edited with JD Talasek Visual Culture and Bioscience: Issues in Cultural Theory, No. 12, a publication organized by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland Baltimore County and Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC. The book is an exploration of the relationships between bio-sciences and art, and translates the remarks of participants in an online symposium centered on the "current dialogue surrounding the relationship between the science lab and the art studio". (Panelists: Carl Djerassi of Stanford University, Troy Duster of NYU, Marvin Heiferman of SVA, David Freedberg of Columbia University, artists Oron Catts and Catherine Chalmers, Art in America Senior Editor Nancy Princenthal, writer Andrew Solomon and others.)
Handbook of Genetics and Society Anker authored the chapter "Cultural imaginaries and laboratories of the real: Representing the genetic sciences" in The Handbook of Genetics & Society: Mapping the New Genomic Era, published in 2009 by Routledge. Her essay is focused on the pictorial practices employed by both artists and scientists to produce knowledge.
Social Text: Interspecies In 2011 Anker contributed to Interspecies, Social Text issue 106 (Volume 29, Number 1, Spring 2011), published by Duke University Press. The journal includes an interview by feminist science studies scholar and anthropologist Sarah Franklin and Suzanne Anker, in an exchange that addresses the "visual culture of specimen display and its significance in both art and social theory, considering the role of bio-art in the production of the specimen as spectacle".
Bio Art: Altered Realities Suzanne Anker wrote the foreword to the book Bio Art: Altered Realities, authored by William Myers in 2015. The publication explores the work of bio artists, "those who work with living organisms and life processes to address the possibilities and dangers posed by biotechnological advancement".
Lectures and Symposia Anker has participated in lectures and symposia in prominent institutions around the world, including Harvard University, Boston; University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; Yale University, New Haven; Art-Sci UCLA, Los Angeles; Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; London School of Economics, London; European Molecular Biology Laboratory- EMBL, Monterotondo, Italy; Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Dresden; Leiden University, NL; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee; Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Banff Art Center, Alberta; The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Washington, D.C.; Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Berlin; University of Amsterdam, NL; New York Academy of Sciences, Institute for the Humanities, New York University; DLD, Munich.
Selected artworks
Gene Pool Anker's interests in the natural world extended her investigation into the microscopic domain of chromosomes and genes. Appropriating scientific images, she created Gene Pool in 1991, a body of work that includes suspended pigment on large vellum sheets and expansive sculptural arrays employing metallic fibers of stainless steel, copper, aluminum and bronze.
Zoosemiotics Zoosemiotics: Primates, Frog, Gazelle, Fish (1993) is a sculptural installation by Suzanne Anker. The work was first displayed in 1993 at The Hanes Art Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was later featured in the Devices of Wonder exhibition at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2001-2002). The installation work is emblematic of the interaction of art and science and "conjures up the alchemist's medieval laboratory and its mottled crystal ball". It features a large glass vessel filled with water and an installation of sculptural forms reminiscent of chromosomal pairs from fish, frogs, gazelles and primates (gorilla, chimpanzee and orangutan), emulating the laboratory technician's charts of the subtle genetic differences between species. Zoosemiotics was included in Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution curated by Marvin Heiferman and Carole Kismaric, originating at Exit Art, New York, September 2000 and touring to museums nationally through March 2004.Heiferman, Marvin and Carole Kismaric, curators. "Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution." Exit Art, New York, (September 9 – October 28, 2000) Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, (Oct. 25–Dec. 15, 2002)
Other works that reflect scientific representations of chromosomes include Chromosome Chart of Suzanne Anker –a presentation of her own DNA sequence as a self-portrait– and Cellular Script, in which she displays chromosome patterns as a kind of calligraphy. Similarly, the installation Codex.X.GenomeJohnson, Ken. "Galleries: Chelsea." The New York Times, Oct. 13, 2000. Exhibition review: Suzanne Anker: Code.X:Genome, Universal Concepts Unlimited, September 14 – October 21, 2000. presents magnified images of chromosomes that resemble ancient writing.
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