Edgar Arceneaux explores connections between historical events and present-day truths in drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and multi-media events. In the artist’s work, linear logic is abandoned in favor of wordplay and visual associations, revealing how language, technology, and systems of ordering produce reality as much as describe them. Seemingly disparate elements—such as science fiction, civil rights era speeches, techno music, and the crumbling architecture of Detroit—find a new synchronicity in the artist’s hands, ultimately pointing to larger historical forces such as the rise of the surveillance state.
Recently, Arceneaux has been expanding these concerns into a new body of work focusing on mirrors. Glass shards and mirrors have figured in his work before, but now they literally compose the piece. Through a strenuous process of chemically stripping the mirrors from their backing and transferring them to canvas, Arceneaux creates new complex gestural images that are reflective, yet fragmented, broken and layered, with distressed colors of silver, black, green, and rust.
Edgar Arceneaux was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, and lives and works in Pasadena, California. He is a graduate of Art Center College of Design (BFA, 1996) and the California Institute for the Arts (MFA, 2001). He is an Associate Professor of Art for Roski School of Art and Design at USC. He played a seminal role in the creation of the Watts House Project, a redevelopment initiative to remodel a series of houses around the Watts Towers, serving as director from 1999 to 2012. His work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2008), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Performa 15, New York; and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, among other venues.
Recent solo exhibitions include Edgar Arceneaux, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Library of Black Lies, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Edgar Arceneaux, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Written in Smoke and Fire, MIT LIST Center for Contemporary Art, Cambridge, MA; and Hopelessness Freezes Time 1967 Detroit Riots, Detroit Techno and Michael Heizer’s Dragged Mass, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland. Arceneaux has also had solo exhibitions at REDCAT, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Studio Museum Harlem, New York. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo, Norway; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; the Bronx Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; and MCA Chicago, Chicago.
The artist’s work resides in many public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the New York Public Library, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; among others.
- 1972
- 2001
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- 1996
Selected Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
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- 2022
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Selected Group Exhibitions
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- 2023-2024
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- 2022-2023
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- 2019-2020
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- 2001-2002
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Video Screenings
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Bibliography
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Catalogues
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Awards, Grants and Fellowships
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Public Collections