Ken Feingold

Kenneth Feingold (born 1952 in USA) is a contemporary American artist based in New York City.

Feingold was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1952.

He studied at Antioch College from 1970 through 1971, making experimental 16mm films and film installations and worked at The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York.

While attending Antioch, Feingold studied with and was the Teaching Assistant for Paul Sharits.

Other solo exhibitions in the early 1970s included Gallery A-402, CalArts, Valencia and Claire S. Copley Gallery, Los Angeles.

Three video works were included in the "Southland Video Anthology", a group exhibition at Long Beach Museum of Art.

In late 1971 he left Antioch and moved to San Francisco.

Later he transferred to CalArts, and moved to Los Angeles.

He has been exhibiting his work in video, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, and installations since 1974.

He worked as studio assistant for John Baldessari until 1976.

He graduated from CalArts with both Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees.

His first solo exhibition of 16mm films was held at Millennium Film Workshop, New York, and he was included in the group exhibitions "Text & Image" and "Stills" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

In 1976 he moved back to New York and worked as a studio assistant for Vito Acconci.

In the following year he took up a teaching post at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

He had a film screening at The Kitchen, New York and an article on his work was published: "Six Films by Ken Feingold" by David James published in Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) Journal, LA.

He participated in a survey of his 16mm films at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and exhibited an installation in the Project Room at Artists' Space, New York.

Feingold's video installation "Sexual Jokes" was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and he received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Art Fellowship, and later a Media Arts Fellowship.

Taking a sabbatical from teaching, he travelled India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

He participated in the 1985 and 1989 Whitney Biennial and exhibited widely in America and Europe.

His video artworks "5dim/MIND" and "The Double" were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

He returned to Asia in 1985, continuing his work in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, and India.

His three-year project of videotaping in South Asia resulted in the Distance of the Outsider series of video works.

Among these were "India Time" (1987) and "Life in Exile" (1988), a series of interviews with Tibetan philosophers and former political prisoners living in exile in India.

Feingold received a Fellowship from the Japan/US Friendship Commission and took up an extended residency in Tokyo in 1990.

During the 1990s Feingold exhibited in the US, Europe, Korea, and Japan.

Nagoya City Art Gallery, Nagoya, Japan, held a retrospective video screening of his work in 1990.

In the early 1990s he created interactive works with speaking puppets connected to the Internet.

His first web projects were REKD and JCJ Junkman.

An account of Feingold's interactive and media artwork can be found in SurReal Time Interaction or How to Talk to a Dummy in a Magnetic Mirror? by Erkki Huhtamo, artintact3 (ZKM Karlsruhe).

He won the Videonale-Preis at BonnVideonale, Bonn Kunstverein, for his work Un Chien Délicieux.

Feingold's first interactive artwork "The Surprising Spiral" was completed in 1991.

It was first exhibited at Kunsthalle Dominikannerkirche, "European Media Art Festival", Osnabrück, Germany and then traveled widely throughout Europe.

In 1997 he created the interactive installation "Interior" for InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, "ICC Biennale ‘97" and was awarded the DNP Internet ‘97 Interactive Award; Dai Nippon Printing, Tokyo.

His video work "Un Chien Délicieux" was included in documenta X, Kassel, as part of a curated program titled "Beware: In Portraying the Phantom You Become One" ("Vorsicht! Wer Phantom Spielt wird selbst eins", 1997).

This project was also exhibited in Paris as "Prends garde! A jouer au fantôme, on le devient (Musée National d'Art Moderne /Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997)".

The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, commissioned the interactive work "Head" for the exhibition "Alien Intelligence" in 1999.

He maintained a studio in Buenos Aires and developed his first interactive conversation works.

In 1999 he was awarded a prize by Fundación Telefónica; Vida 3.0 (Life 3.0), Madrid.

He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004) and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship (2003) and has taught at Princeton University and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science, among others.

His works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Liverpool, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.