Biography

Sam Durant is a North Atlantic artist whose interdisciplinary work engages 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. He has 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) was installed on the High Line Plinth in New York from 2020-22 and raised the issues of drone warfare and surveillance.

Growing up near Boston, MA in the 1970’s he experienced anti-war and civil rights demonstrations and the attempted desegregation of the Boston 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 histories, 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 re-contextualizes memorials to victims of the conquest of North America, and more recently with Proposal for Non-aligned Monuments, Free Movement (2020). 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 iconoclasm.

Durant also writes, publishes, curates and organizes. He compiled and edited the monograph, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (Rizzoli Intl.) and curated the exhibition of the same name at MOCA, Los Angeles and the New Museum, New York. Durant’s interviews and writing have been featured in publications like Mousse, Artforum and Flash Art, he has contributed essays to monographic catalogs for artists Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Siah Armajani and Hans Haacke. From 2005 to 2010 he was a member of the collective Transforma Projects, a grassroots cultural re-building initiative in New Orleans. In 2012/13 Durant was an artist in residence at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Kunstverein Düsseldorf; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; MACRO, Rome; and Cultuurcentrum Strombeek, Brussels. Durant’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta 13, the Yokohama Triennial, the Venice, Sydney, Busan, Liverpool, Panama, and Whitney Biennials. His work can be found in many public collections including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; FNAC, Paris, France; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX; and Tate Modern, London, England. His work is represented by Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Sadie Coles HQ, London and Praz Delavellade, Paris. Durant is based in Berlin and teaches at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart.

Born
Seattle, Washington, 1961
Lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles

Education
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, M.F.A.
Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, B.F.A.

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