OEUVRE OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY AND ARTISTIC INNOVATION
Ann Hamilton’s art may best be described as a multi-sensory experience that is tactile, immersive, and ephemeral. Known for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations, Hamilton’s work has been extensively featured across the globe, from Kumamoto, Japan and Paris, France to Stockholm, Sweden and Washington, D.C., and, most recently, in England.
Pictured: Ann Hamilton. Photo by Calista Lyon.
Born in Lima, Ohio, Hamilton has established herself as a world-renowned visual artist over her decades-long career. Hamilton, who moved to Columbus with her family at the age of 2, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979 and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 1985. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of The Ohio State University, where she is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art. Today, she and her husband Michael Mercil—a fellow artist and Emeritus Professor of Art at Ohio State—continue to live and work in Columbus.
Hamilton has been the recipient of many prestigious honors, including the National Medal of the Arts, the Heinz Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the NEA Visual Arts Fellows, and the Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other esteemed distinctions. She also represented the United States in the São Paulo Bienal and the Venice Biennale—the two oldest and most renowned art biennales in the world—in 1991 and 1999, respectively.
“There’s some large gap between recognizing you love something and calling yourself something. I just grew up loving making things, and I had a ton of support from my family.”
Ann Hamilton
Despite her international recognition and acclaim, Hamilton didn’t necessarily see herself becoming an artist when she was growing up; she simply enjoyed the act of creating things. As Hamilton told 614 Magazine in 2020, “There’s some large gap between recognizing you love something and calling yourself something. I just grew up loving making things, and I had a ton of support from my family.”
Her unique perspective and artistic brilliance have been expressed through an impressive range of mediums—including sculpture, printmaking, video, and photography—and by using everyday objects like cloth, furniture, coins, and thimbles. Early in Hamilton’s career, as part of her 1984 body object series, she created a suit made of thousands of densely layered toothpicks, which she photographed herself wearing.
In addition to creating memorable, one-of-a-kind works of art, Hamilton has also dedicated herself to supporting future generations of artists through teaching. From 1985 to 1991, Hamilton taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Shortly after leaving UC Santa Barbara, she established her home base in Columbus and, roughly a decade later, joined the faculty at Ohio State to continue teaching.
In 2014, to help preserve Hamilton’s sweeping body of work, Ohio State announced the Ann Hamilton Project Archive. The digital archive, which contains more than 1,000 downloadable images of art installations created by Hamilton, is located within Ohio State’s Visual Resource Library and is accessible to the public.
Hamilton’s influence on the visual arts cannot be overstated, nor can her creativity or originality. As she poignantly stated, “One doesn’t arrive—in words or in art—by necessarily knowing where one is going. In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know. You may set out for New York, but you may find yourself as I did in Ohio.”