Sam Durant

PROVENANCE:  Courtesy of   the Artist

“This is a pencil drawing of Camp Delta, JTF Guantanamo. The title is upside down across
The bottom of the piece, “Four Journalists Recently Were Ejected”

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Berlin. He was born in Seattle, Washington in 1961, received his B.F.A at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and his M.F.A at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. 

Durant’s work is frequently engaged with the intertwining of historical and cultural events of the past and present. By means of media ranging from electric signs to found- object sculpture to graphite, Durant explores social, political and cultural events such as civil-rights era, the 1968 student riots, and last century’s struggle between Native Americans and European settlers. Durant has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Museo d’arte contemporanea, Rome; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Kunstverein Düsseldorf; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. He has participated in the 2004 Whitney Museum Biennial, New York; the 2002 Venice Biennale, Italy; and Out of Place: Contemporary Art and the Architectural Uncanny at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

His work has been extensively written about including numerous monographic catalogs and books. In 2006 he compiled and edited a comprehensive monograph of Black Panther artist Emory Douglas’ work. His recent curatorial credits include “Eat the Market” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and “Black Panther: the Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas” at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the New Museum in New York. He has co-organized numerous group shows and artists benefits and is a co-founder of Transforma, a cultural rebuilding collective project that began in New Orleans. He was a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Boss Prize and has received a United States Artists Broad Fellowship and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant. Durant’s Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C. was recently on view at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2014, and at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri in 2015.