Mary Lucier

Mary Lucier (born 1944, in Bucyrus, Ohio) is an American visual artist and pioneer in video art.

She married the composer Alvin Lucier in 1964 and then toured with him as a member of the Sonic Arts Union from 1966 to the mid-1970s.

She lived with him in Middletown, Connecticut after he secured a position at Wesleyan University until their divorce in ‘74, when she moved to New York City.

Lucier was invested in performance and photography during her time in the Sonic Arts Union, creating works such as the Polaroid Image Series, which accompanied Alvin Lucier’s work I am sitting in a room (1969).

During this performance she projected slides transferred from Polaroids which were degraded in a process similar to Alvin Lucier’s recorded voice.

Her movement into video in the early 1970s connected to her interest in the manipulation of the image as well as her fascination with the illuminated television box and its architectural space.

In the 1970s, Lucier started to burn the internal recording tube of her camera by focusing on the sun which can be seen in her multi-channel video works Dawn Burn (1975), Paris Dawn Burn (1977) and Equinox (1979).

Concentrating primarily on video and installation since 1973, she has produced numerous multiple- and single-channel pieces that have had a significant impact on the medium.

Lucier grew up in Bucyrus, Ohio, before receiving her B.A. from Brandeis University in literature and sculpture.

She also performed a piece Fire Writing in 1975 at The Kitchen where she used laser beams to burn text onto the Vidicon tube of her hand-held camera, which can be seen in the resulting video image.

In the 1980s, Lucier moved into greater aesthetic and sculptural concerns with her work, reflecting a clear shift in video art sensibilities of the time period.

Her 2-channel, 7-monitor installation Ohio at Giverny (1983) both removes the television box from view in its installation and provides a translation to video of Claude Monet’s technique of rendering light palpable.

Carnegie Museum of Art (1983)

Lucier has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1985, the Rockefeller Foundation in 2001, Creative Capital in 2001, Anonymous Was a Woman in 1998, the Nancy Graves Foundation in 2003, USA Artists in 2010, the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Grant, the Jerome Foundation in 1982, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Japan-US Friendship Commission in 2010.

Mary Lucier has presented solo exhibitions at venues such as:

Wilderness (1986) furthered Lucier’s experimentation with installation and landscape by placing three channels of video on seven monitors mounted on faux classical pedestals in a stepped colonnade and focusing on American landscape motifs.

Capp Street Project (1986)

Rose Art Museum (1986)

Dallas Museum of Art (1987)

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1988)

In the 1990s, Lucier would investigate the more devastating aspects of the earth’s landscapes by comparing the ecological precarity of the Brazilian Amazon and Alaskan wildlife with the cancerous human body in Noah’s Raven (1993) and examining the tragedy of flooding through recollections and ruined interiors in Floodsongs (1998).

City Gallery of Contemporary Art (1991)

Toledo Museum of Art (1993)

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995)

Museum of Modern Art (1999)

Emerson Gallery at Hamilton College (2002)

Her work continued to investigate various aspects of the landscape and its diverse peoples into the 21st century including works such as The Plains of Sweet Regret (2004), a 5-channel video installation examining the Great Plains at a time of depopulation.

North Dakota Museum of Art (2004)

Huntington Museum of Art (2007)

Amon Carter Museum (2008)

In Drum Songs (2013) and (Untitled) Spirit Lake (2017) she examines Native American song and dance from the Cankdeska Cikana Singers and Drummers.

Lucier's art can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst in Karlsruhe, Germany, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI, the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York and the Munson-Williams Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York.

She is currently represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery.

Lucier has been an Adjunct Professor in Video Art at SUNY Purchase, a Visiting Regent's Professor in Art and Art History at UC Davis, a Visiting Lecturer in Video Art at Harvard University, and a visiting professor of Film and Video at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

She has also taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art, at New York University, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, at the San Francisco Art Institute, and at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Tacoma Art Museum (2014–2015)

She would later marry the painter Robert Berlind, who passed away in 2015.

She currently lives in both New York City and Cochecton, New York, where she has established a studio and archive for video art.

The Kitchen (2016)

The Phoenix Art Museum (2018)