Ann Hamilton (artist) facts for kids

Ann Hamilton is an American artist famous for her large-scale art installations. These artworks often combine many different types of art, like textiles, sculpture, video, and performance. She started making art in the early 1980s.

Ann studied textile design at the University of Kansas. After that, she lived in Canada for a while. Then, she decided to study sculpture at Yale University. From 1985 to 1991, she taught art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Ann Hamilton has been a professor at the Ohio State University.

About Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton was born in Lima, Ohio. She studied textile design and later sculpture. She now lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, Michael Mercil, who is also an artist.

What Inspires Her Art

Hamilton in 2019

Even though Ann Hamilton studied textile design, she chose to focus on sculpture in graduate school. She was interested in how things relate to each other in a space. She felt that the connections between objects were more important than the objects themselves.

When she was teaching, Ann started mixing different art forms. She combined textiles with photography and performance. Her art often includes fabric, like old shirts or work uniforms.

Ann Hamilton also loves to read. She reads books, poetry, and even dictionaries. Because of this, words and books often appear in her art. Her work also explores ideas about people, like gender, the body, and feelings.

As a conceptual artist, she uses video, sound, and interactive installations. This means her art often changes over time. It can also show ideas about decay or how things break down. Ann Hamilton wants people to experience her art with all their senses. She often adds sounds or smells to her pieces. This helps viewers connect with the art in a deeper way. Her artworks also often relate to the places where they are made. She uses objects that show the history of that city or culture.

Famous Artworks

Early Works (1984–1990)

suitably positioned

This was one of Ann Hamilton's first big installations in 1984. It showed many of her artistic ideas. For this piece, she made a suit out of an old men's suit and toothpicks. She then stood in the studio wearing the suit. Viewers could walk around her but did not interact with her. This artwork connected the suit as an object with Ann herself wearing it.

body object series

While working on suitably positioned, Ann Hamilton started thinking differently about her art. She wanted to show a relationship, not just a picture of one. This led to her body object series. This is a collection of photographs first made in 1984. She worked with photographer Bob McMurtry. In these photos, Ann wore objects she had made, like her toothpick suit. She said these coverings showed "the boundaries of the body."

privation and excesses

In 1989, Ann Hamilton showed privation and excesses in San Francisco. She covered a large part of the gallery floor with $7,500 worth of pennies. The pennies were stuck down with a thin layer of honey. A person, sometimes Ann herself, sat in a chair nearby. They would wring their hands in a hat full of honey.

palimpsest

This installation was a team effort with Kathryn Clark in 1989. It was shown in New York. The artwork had two main parts. One part showed lost memories, and the other showed memories being experienced. In the first part, walls were covered with block-printed texts using shoe polish. In the second part, visitors could enter a room. It smelled of beeswax and had the sound of paper fluttering. The walls were covered with small pieces of old newsprint. Each piece had handwritten memories and was attached with a single tack. A fan made them rustle. In the middle of the room, two cabbages were being eaten by snails.

Works from 1991–2000

indigo blue

indigo blue is one of Ann Hamilton's most famous works. It was first shown in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1991. She made it for an exhibition called Places with a Past. The artwork honored hard work and manual labor. It included a pile of 47,000 blue work uniforms. There were also sacks of soybeans hanging on a wall. These soybeans slowly spilled and sprouted because of the humid air.

Behind the uniforms, a writer sat at a table. They used an eraser and saliva to remove writing from small, blue-covered books. This action of erasing the past also remembered labor. The names on the shirts echoed the history of workers in the city. The blue objects and the title also referred to Charleston's history. Indigo was very important to the city's economy. The artwork was later shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007.

tropos

In 1993, Ann Hamilton presented tropos at the Dia Art Foundation. The word tropos means "a turn" in Greek. For this artwork, she covered the entire floor of a warehouse with woven horse hair. She sat at a small table in the middle of the room. While sitting, she carefully burned each word from a book using a heated coil.

Allegheny Riverfront Park

From 1993 to 2001, Ann Hamilton and other artists worked on a new park design. This was for the Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They wanted to create a peaceful place with a beautiful view of the city. The park included a lower level almost a mile long. It also had an upper level along a busy street. They created a boardwalk with trees and stone edges for sitting.

Works from 2001–2010

the picture is still

This video was shown in Japan in 2001. Ann Hamilton used a small camera very close to a black-and-white photo of her son. She moved her hand slowly over the photo. Because of the camera's position and her hand movement, the video often looked blurry. It showed abstract blurs of mouths and noses. Ann said the movement showed that "the picture is still" – meaning not moving, but also "still here," like history staying with us.

human carriage

In 2009, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum had an exhibition called The Third Mind. Ann Hamilton created an installation called human carriage for it. This artwork showed her interest in people, language, and materials. It used books and a manual travel system. She tied together sections of books, calling them "book weights." These were stored at the top of the museum.

The book weights were attached to a pulley system. A "reader" at the top operated it, sending the books down to a pile at the bottom. Along the museum's spiral ramps, Ann also built a spiraling pipe. A smaller bell carriage with Tibetan cymbals slid along this pipe. Before each book went down, the "reader" released the bell carriage. It would ring as it spiraled, filling the space with sound before meeting the books.

Recent Works (2011–2018)

the event of a thread

In 2012, Ann Hamilton showed the event of a thread at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. This installation had a large white curtain with big swings. The curtain stretched across a huge space. Like many of her works, this installation changed over time. It involved the audience in a multi-sensory experience.

Viewers could carry radios in paper bags. These radios played audio from two actors reading texts. At the other end of the room, a writer sat writing sentences. The artwork changed daily. The sounds of people, cell phones, laughter, reading, writing, and pigeons filled the space. When people swung, the curtain swayed. Visitors could swing, look through a window, lie on the ground, or walk through the exhibition.

the common S E N S E

Ann Hamilton was asked to create new works for an exhibition in Seattle. It was called the common S E N S E. She used items from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture and the University of Washington Libraries. She created an exhibition about animals. It explored what we share with animals and how we use them.

Cortlandt Street subway station project

The New York City subway system asked Ann Hamilton to create art for the Cortlandt Street subway station. This station was rebuilt after September 11, 2001. This project is like her earlier work, VERSE. It weaves together words. But here, it uses texts from important historical documents. These include the United States Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The white text appears on the white walls of the station. It covers up to 70 percent of the wall surface. Ann Hamilton wants people to experience this project, not just look at it. She hopes each person traveling through the station will connect with the words differently.

O N E E V E R Y O N E

For O N E E V E R Y O N E, Ann Hamilton photographed many different people. She took their pictures through a semi-transparent screen or window. The image only became clear when the person touched the screen. Ann would tell the subjects how to move, guiding them only with her voice. She felt this was like waiting for answers in a medical setting. You rely on a voice without seeing a physical person clearly.

Exhibitions Around the World

List of Selected Artworks

Group Exhibitions

• Rites of Spring, Twining Gallery, New York, 1985
• Elements, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, New York, 1987
• Stranger Attractors: Signs of Chaos, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1989
• New Works for New Spaces, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 1990

Permanent Public Artworks

• Mess Hall, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, 1989
• San Francisco Public Library Commission (collaboration with James Freed, Kathy Simon, and Ann Chamberlain), 1990
• Pittsburgh River Front Park (collaboration with Michael Van Valkenburgh, Michael Mercil, and Matthew Urbansky), 1994

Awards and Recognition

Ann Hamilton has received many important awards for her art. These include:

• The Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2008)
• United States Artists Fellowship (2007)
• The Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (1998)
• The National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship (1993)
• A MacArthur Fellows Program "Genius Grant" (1993)
• The Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (1992)
• The Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1989)
• The Bessie Award (1988)

In 2014, Ohio State University started an archive called the Ann Hamilton Project Archive. This archive keeps images of more than 35 of her installations. In September 2015, Ann Hamilton received the National Medal of Arts. This is a very high honor for artists in the United States.