bio
QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose projects integrate original text, photography, film projections, site specific installation, and live performance collaborations with composers and choreographers. Working with salvaged military and espionage cameras and typewriters, Ms. Wikswo explores unmarked and obscured sites in Europe and the Americas to document forgotten mythologies, secret legends, and hidden histories that often include little-known crimes against humanity. Her major grants and commissions include projects within the American slavery and civil rights eras, obscured Native American and Indigenous sites throughout the Americas, as well as diverse sites of trauma from the former Communist Eastern Europe, the former Nazi States, the Argentinian Dirty War, the Spanish Civil War, the Portuguese Inquisition, the Witch Trials, and Gender crimes against queer people the United Staes. Her singular vision and process crosses disciplines and defies distances between past and present, analog and digital, the anachronistic and the avant-garde. Wikswo's projects are exhibited, published and performed widely in the Americas, Europe and Asia, where she has received major fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pollock Krasner Residency at Yaddo, the Center for Cultural Innovation, ARC/Durfee, Djerassi, the Puffin Foundation, Ucross, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus, and more. VISUAL ART The first solo museum survey of her work, PROPHECY OF PLACE: QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO is presented by Yeshiva University Museum in New York City from August 2011 through February 2012 and features her multi-panel photography as well as text, assemblage, multi-channel and projected video installation, and the world premieres of her live performance works Schwarzer Tod and the Useless Eaters (composer Andrea Clearfield and choreographer Manfred Fischbeck) and Sonderbauten: The Special Block (choreographer Alexx Shilling and composer Isaac Schankler). Her works appear at major institutions including Schloss Plüschow(Germany), the Lyon Musée des Moulages (France), the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles), National Sun Yat-sen Museum (Taiwan), the University of Maryland, the University of Southern California, Art Center College of Design, California State University at Fullerton, and in multiple galleries in Los Angeles and around the world. LITERATURE Wikswo is recognized for her visionary exploration of new forms and hybrids in fiction, poetry, performance libretto, non-fiction, and text-and-image work. Her writing appears in prominent magazines and journals including Tin House, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, WITNESS, New American Writing, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sidebrow, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat and many more, and in anthologies, artist’s books, and exhibition catalogues including One Blood: The Narrative Influence (University of Alaska Press). PERFORMANCE Wikswo's new media performance works engage her own original texts, photography, film, video, and field recordings, and include performance electronics, video projections, multichannel text installations, stop-motion animation, and more. Through an adventurous collaborative process, the works expand across music, movement, dance, opera, and theater via a creative team that includes composers Andrea Clearfield, Veronika Krausas, Pamela Madsen, Anne La Berge, Isaac Schankler, Tom Flaherty, and Jeffrey Holmes, choregraphers Manfred Fischbeck and Alexxandra Shilling, and a spectrum of actors, musicians, and performers. These works have been issued on monographic DVDs including Prophecy of Place (Catalysis Projects/YUM), Waterland: Veronika Krausas, Andre Alexis and Quintan Ana Wikswo, and Quintan Ana Wikswo: Three Curio Films. Recent works premiered in Los Angeles at Microfest and the Composer’s Project, and internationally through the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM) and the National Center for Music Creation (GRAME). ACADEMIC COMMITMENT A dedicated interdisciplinary teacher, Wikswo maintains a lively reading and artist talk tour throughout Europe and the United States, and frequently presents master classes, guest lectures, and workshops within graduate and undergraduate programs in English, Music, Performance, Film, and Visual Art. Currently the Resident Artist in the interdisciplinary Honors College at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, she has lectured in the Creative Writing at San Francisco State University and many other institutions. She holds an interdisciplinary BA with Honors in History, Critical Theory, Gender Studies and African American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied with Douglas Kellner. She was awarded an international fellowship in Gender Studies to the University of Sydney, Australia, and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she was honored with the President’s Award and the University Distinguished Service Award. Her studios are located in New York City and Los Angeles. PHOTO BY VIVIAN BABUTS |
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