Roselee Goldberg
Encyclopedia
RoseLee Goldberg is an American
-based art historian, author
, critic
and curator
. She wrote a study of performance art
, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. First published in 1979 and now in its third edition (2001), Goldberg's book is now a key text for teaching performance in universities and has been translated into over seven languages, including Chinese, Croatian, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish .
Born in Durban, South Africa, Goldberg studied Political Science
and Fine Arts at Wits University, Johannesburg, and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art
in London
. As director of the Royal College of Art Gallery, London, Goldberg set precedents for exhibiting modern and contemporary performance and organized exhibitions, performance series, and symposia on a broad range of multi-disciplinary artists including Marina Abramovic
, Bernd and Hilla Becher
, Christian Boltanski
, Brian Eno
, the Kipper Kids
, Piero Manzoni
, Anthony McCall
, and Christo and Jeanne Claude.
Goldberg was curator at The Kitchen
, New York. Her programming included the creation of an exhibition space, a video viewing room, and performance series. While at The Kitchen, Goldberg presented works by Laurie Anderson
, Phillip Glass, Peter Gordon, Meredith Monk
, and Robert Wilson
and curated the first solo exhibitions of Jack Goldstein
, Sherrie Levine
, Robert Longo
, David Salle
, and Cindy Sherman
, among others.
Goldberg has curated several performance series including "Six Evenings of Performance," as part of the High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Couleurs Superposees: Acte VII, a performance by Daniel Buren
, (in association with Works & Process
), at the Guggenheim, New York
.
In 2001 Goldberg commissioned and produced Logic of the Birds, a multi-media performance by Shirin Neshat
in collaboration with composer and singer Sussan Deyhim
. Developed in residency at Mass MOCA, Logic of the Birds was presented in workshop at the Kitchen in 2001, and premiered at the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival, and toured to the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, and Artangel, London. In 2004, Goldberg founded PERFORMA, a non-profit multi-disciplinary arts organization for the "research, development, and presentation of 21st Century visual art performance".
Goldberg has taught at New York University
since 1987 and has lectured at Columbia University
, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Kyoto University of Art and Design, the Mori Museum, Tokyo, the Tate Modern, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University, among other institutions. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum, and her publications include Performance Since 1960 (1998), Laurie Anderson (2000) and Shirin Neshat (2002). Goldberg has two forthcoming books in 2007: PERFORMA, the first in a series of publications to accompany the PERFORMA biennials and Performance Now: New Art, New Dance, New Media published by Thames and Hudson. She was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and Communication.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
-based art historian, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, critic
Critic
A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...
and curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
. She wrote a study of performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. First published in 1979 and now in its third edition (2001), Goldberg's book is now a key text for teaching performance in universities and has been translated into over seven languages, including Chinese, Croatian, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish .
Born in Durban, South Africa, Goldberg studied Political Science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
and Fine Arts at Wits University, Johannesburg, and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art
Courtauld Institute of Art
The Courtauld Institute of Art is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art. The Courtauld is one of the premier centres for the teaching of art history in the world; it was the only History of Art department in the UK to be awarded a top...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. As director of the Royal College of Art Gallery, London, Goldberg set precedents for exhibiting modern and contemporary performance and organized exhibitions, performance series, and symposia on a broad range of multi-disciplinary artists including Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramović is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.” Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and...
, Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernard "Bernd" Becher , and Hilla Becher, née Wobeser , were German artists working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures.- Biography :Bernd Becher was born in Siegen...
, Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski is French sculptor, photographer, painter and film maker.-Life and work:Having no formal art education, he began painting in 1958. Nevertheless, he first came to public attention in 1960 with few short films and publication of several notebooks...
, Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
, the Kipper Kids
The Kipper Kids
The Kipper Kids are contemporary artists who live and work in New York, USA, and Scarborough, United Kingdom.-Biography:Martin von Haselberg and Brian Routh are a performance duo...
, Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni
Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art. Influenced by the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera...
, Anthony McCall
Anthony McCall
Anthony McCall is a British-born American Avant-Garde artist, specializing in cinema/projected film.thumb|Anthony McCall at Gallery Zander , Cologne...
, and Christo and Jeanne Claude.
Goldberg was curator at The Kitchen
The Kitchen
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary art and performance space located at at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City...
, New York. Her programming included the creation of an exhibition space, a video viewing room, and performance series. While at The Kitchen, Goldberg presented works by Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...
, Phillip Glass, Peter Gordon, Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. Since the 1960s, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records.-Life and work:Meredith Monk is primarily known for her...
, and Robert Wilson
Robert Wilson (director)
Robert Wilson is an American avant-garde stage director and playwright who has been called "[America]'s — or even the world's — foremost vanguard 'theater artist'". Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he has also worked as a choreographer, performer, painter, sculptor, video...
and curated the first solo exhibitions of Jack Goldstein
Jack Goldstein
Jack Goldstein was a Canadian born, California-based performance and conceptual artist turned painter in the 1980s art boom.-Early life and education:...
, Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer and appropriation artist.-Education:Levine received her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1969. In 1973, she earned an M.F.A. from the same institution....
, Robert Longo
Robert Longo
Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which depicted sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted emotion.-Early life and education:...
, David Salle
David Salle
David Salle is an American painter who helped define postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with a varied pictorial language of multi-imagery...
, and Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...
, among others.
Goldberg has curated several performance series including "Six Evenings of Performance," as part of the High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Couleurs Superposees: Acte VII, a performance by Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist.- Work :Sometimes classified as an abstract minimalist Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting maxi stripes to integrate the visual surface and architectural space, notably historical, landmark architecture.Among his chief concerns is the...
, (in association with Works & Process
Works & Process
Works & Process at the Guggenheim is a performing-arts series at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Works & Process informs artistic creation through conversation and performance, and is presented in the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Peter B...
), at the Guggenheim, New York
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is a well-known museum located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States. It is the permanent home to a renowned collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art and also features special exhibitions...
.
In 2001 Goldberg commissioned and produced Logic of the Birds, a multi-media performance by Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat
Shirin Neshat شیرین نشاط is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.-Background:Neshat's parents were upper middle-class...
in collaboration with composer and singer Sussan Deyhim
Sussan Deyhim
Sussan Deyhim is an Iranian singer, composer and dancer.Born in Tehran, her career began as a dancer with Iran's Pars National Ballet company...
. Developed in residency at Mass MOCA, Logic of the Birds was presented in workshop at the Kitchen in 2001, and premiered at the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival, and toured to the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, and Artangel, London. In 2004, Goldberg founded PERFORMA, a non-profit multi-disciplinary arts organization for the "research, development, and presentation of 21st Century visual art performance".
Goldberg has taught at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
since 1987 and has lectured at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Kyoto University of Art and Design, the Mori Museum, Tokyo, the Tate Modern, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University, among other institutions. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum, and her publications include Performance Since 1960 (1998), Laurie Anderson (2000) and Shirin Neshat (2002). Goldberg has two forthcoming books in 2007: PERFORMA, the first in a series of publications to accompany the PERFORMA biennials and Performance Now: New Art, New Dance, New Media published by Thames and Hudson. She was recently named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and Communication.