Janet Biggs


Janet Biggs is an American artist, known for her work in video, photography and performance art. Biggs lives and works in New York City.
Biggs' work focuses on individuals in extreme landscapes or situations and often navigates territory between art and science. She has captured such events as kayaks performing a synchronized ballet in Arctic waters and sulfur miners inside an active volcano. Recent projects have explored the creation and loss of memory from personal, physical, and scientific perspectives. Biggs’ work has taken her into areas of conflict in the Horn of Africa and to Mars. She has collaborated with neuroscientists, Arctic explorers, aerospace engineers, astrophysicists, miners, Yemeni refugees, and a robot. Her earlier video work dealt with issues of psychosis and psychotropic drugs.
Biggs was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts in 2018.
In June 2019, Biggs presented ', an exhibition of new video work, at the in New York City. As part of this exhibition, Biggs' premiered ""How the Light Gets In," a multi-media performance, at the Theater at the New Museum.

Recent work

In addition to videos, her recent work includes multi-discipline performances, often including multiple large-scale videos, live musicians, artificial intelligence, paraplegics and athletes. Her newest work incorporates footage shot by Biggs at refugee camps in Djibouti, in Ethiopian badlands, and at Mars simulations in Utah and the Himalayas. She has recently trained in space medicine, equestrian vaulting and arctic kayaking.
In December, 2018, Biggs had solo exhibitions and film screenings at the Museo de la Naturaleza y el Hombre and the Museum of Science and the Cosmos in the Canary Islands.
In May 2018, Biggs was included in "Shots Across the Plane," at the at Zurab Tsereteli Museum of Modern Art in Tbilisi, Georgia.
In 2017, the Neuberger Museum of Art presented "A Step on the Sun."
In addition, Biggs' work has recently been presented in shows at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
, the 17º Festival Internacional de la Imagen in Manizales Colombia, "Art & Coal", at the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl in Marl, Germany, "For a gentle song would not shake us if we had never heard a loud one" at the Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen, Denmark. and "Videos for a Stadium" at the University of Kentucky Art Museum Lexington, KY.
Biggs was selected to be on Crew 181 of the Mars Desert Research Station, and has incorporated elements of space exploration in her latest work.

Exhibitions and screenings

Biggs has recently been presented in solo shows and screenings at Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York City, Connersmith Gallery in Washington, DC, Barbara Polla's Analix Forever Gallery in Geneva, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn NY, and Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt Germany.
In June 2017, at David Lynch's Club Silencio in Paris, Biggs presented a premier of her performance piece, "Far From Home," which incorporated a live musical performance by Rhys Chatham and a reading by Frank Smith with video of her recent work in a Yemeni refugee camp in Djibouti and at the Mars Desert Research Station.
In 2015, the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas, presented Biggs' Echo of the Unknown, a multidimensional exhibition combining video, sound, and objects that explore the role of memory in the construction of identity. Drawing from her personal memories of the effects of Alzheimer’s on family members, heroic stories of public figures coping with the disease, and research conducted with neurologists and geoscientists, Biggs raises fundamental questions about how we become–and how we lose our sense of–who we are. In conjunction with Echo of the Unknown, Blaffer collaborated with more than a dozen UH colleges and Houston institutions on the Blaffer Art Museum Innovation Series, an ambitious slate of lectures, gallery talks and panel discussions, enhancing the exhibition’s role as a catalyst for cross-disciplinary learning.
In 2014 Biggs was exhibited in the First International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartegena de Indias.
The Tampa Museum of Art presented a survey of Biggs' work in 2011. Biggs' video work has also been shown in solo exhibitions at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Glaskasten Marl Sculpture Museum, the Mint Museum, the Gibbes Museum of Art, the McNay Museum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Videonale 13 and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 2012, Biggs' Arctic Trilogy was screened as part of the Environmental Film Festival at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Biggs travelled to the far Arctic in 2009-2010, where she captured images of individuals' interaction with extremes environments above and below the ice. Biggs used this footage to create three videos, These videos were premiered at Ed Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea in February 2011. This show was reviewed in the New York Times by Holland Carter.
On July 14, 2009, Vanishing Point was screened at New York's River To River Festival. That same evening, Biggs' videos accompanied an ambient performance by Anthony Gonzalez of the band M83.

Recognition

The artist was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts in 2018.
In 2016, Biggs was selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson as part of ArtReview magazine's "Future Greats - the artists to look out for in 2016." Also in 2016, Biggs was named a Distinguished Alumni at Moore College of Art and Design.
The October 2015 Art In America featured an article written by Faye Hirsch on Biggs' work, with a focus on the Blaffer exhibition.
ArtNew's April 2015 cover article "Art Made in Harm's Way" by Lily Wei featured Biggs' travels to Ethiopia's border conflict, where she filmed local Afar militia as they patrolled the Ethiopian/Eritrean border.
In 2013 Biggs was awarded a la Napoule Art Foundation Riviera Residency, and in 2009 and 2010 she was selected for The Arctic Circle High Arctic Expedition residency. She received an Art Matters Project grant in 2010. Janet Biggs was a recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts grant in 2011 and 2009 through the New York Experimental Television Center. She has received additional funding grants from Art Matters, the Arts and Science Council of Charlotte, and the Goodrich Foundation. In 2004 she received the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship, and received a painting fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989.
Contemporary Magazine profiled Janet Biggs in their March 2007 issue, and one of her photographs was used as the cover of Spot magazine's Summer 2007 issue.

Commercial work

Biggs was commissioned by Puma to create a short film as part of their 2012 Films4Peace initiative.
In 2006, Hermès commissioned Biggs to create a new work of art for their flagship New York store. Biggs installed 11 large monitors in the store's Madison Avenue windows, as well as photographs of equestrian-themed images.

Collections

Her work is in the permanent collections of La Collezione Videoinsight®, Turin, Italy; Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain, Languedoc-Roussillon, France; Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl, Marl, Germany; the Tampa Museum of Art; the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Mint Museum of Art,
Charlotte; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca; and The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut.

Representation

Biggs works with Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York City, CONNERSMITH, Analix Forever, and Galerie Anita Beckers/blink video.

Selected bibliography

Reviews of Biggs' work have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, ArtForum, ARTNews, Art in America, Flash Art, Artnet.com, and many others.
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