Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University
Join the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Sunday, September 25th at 11:00am for a special reception with the artist celebrating the premiere of a new commission as part of the exhibition, Dara Birnbaum: Journey, on view August 20 - November 13, 2022. The commission will be open for viewing beginning on Thursday, September 22, 2022 through the end of the exhibition.
For the new commission, Birnbaum works with digitized 16 mm family footage taken by her father in the earliest years of her life. Birnbaum writes about the commission, “At my age of 74, there is the strong desire to review and bring to the viewer an understanding of growing up in this ‘shadow’ of WWII, the period when the American Dream was weaponized by the United States, after emerging ‘victorious’ from this world war.” In this politically polarized moment in America, Birnbaum turns her gaze toward the origins of her own life and the genesis of the powerful national narrative that has helped shape a fractured American consciousness.
This commission is apart of the exhibition Dara Birnbaum: Journey, a major survey of Dara Birnbaum’s influential practice. This exhibition reviews the trajectory of Birnbaum’s penetrative interrogations of mass media during a period of time when technological transformations enabled seismic shifts in the mass consumption of information and entertainment.
Beginning in the 1970s, Dara Birnbaum’s groundbreaking video, media, and installation work has addressed the ideological and aesthetic character of mass media imagery and has been considered fundamental to our understanding of the history of media art. She was one of the first artists to use manipulated television and media footage and is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of her time.