Alfredo Jaar

Provenance: Courtesy of the Artist

Around the world, people are taught to read, “but who teaches us the influence that images, the media landscape, have? How it changes our vision of the world,” Jaar says. “I really believe that images are not innocent. Every image contains a conception of the world.” And too often those conceptions go unchallenged. (Alfredo Jaar  from “Art provocateur Alfredo Jaar: ‘I want to change the world. I fail all the time’ “, The Guardian.com April 1, 2019)

Alfredo Jaar’s work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations. Subjects addressed in his work include the holocaust in Rwanda, gold mining in Brazil, toxic pollution in Nigeria, and issues related to the border between Mexico and the United States.

Jaar has received many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2000); a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1987); and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987); and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1985). He has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2005); Massachusetts Institute of Technology, List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (1999); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1992). Jaar emigrated from Chile in 1981, at the height of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. His exhibition at Fundación Telefonica in Chile, Santiago (2006), was his first in his native country in twenty-five years. Jaar lives and works in New York.