“Her work stands in direct proportion to life. …Explosive and seriously playful.” —Nanette Vonnegut @TakeMagazine
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Studio 360 PRI interview about “The Alphabet” (2015) with Kurt Andersen.
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Documentary films are available about Habeas Corpus, Bloom, Landlines, and a new film will soon be available about Just a Rumor. Click here for more.
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Anna’s works on paper are included in this issue of the Massachusetts Review: Vol. 52 issue 4 (www.massreview.org)
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Erica Morse at RISD wrote “Painting in Motion“, a piece about Just a Rumor and Here Rests Peggy — here.
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In “Framing Locative Consciousness” Francisco J. Ricardo included Habeas Corpus and Bloom in his analysis of new media and locative art works. He argues that “the final experience needs to be approached with a kind of closure that is more than merely gregariously narratival or austerely conceptual, but is in fact conversational, meaning-preserving, and contemplative of the larger material and sensory whole to which locative art uniquely resonates and for which it appears willing to take extraordinary risks.” Read more here.
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The critic Tim Page wrote a review of my first project, Habeas Corpus (2000), for the Washington Post: “The building exploded into glorious sound, as enveloping as headphones, and continued ringing for the full 28-minute duration. It echoed from the walls, it came from the sky, it seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere. An elderly, immaculately dressed woman stood off to one side and wept quietly throughout, tears cracking through her makeup. Meanwhile, a young man, as skilled and articulate as many a radio correspondent, read eager reports into his cassette recorder, describing “Habaus Corpus” as the “event of a lifetime.” And so it may have been. The faces in the crowd wore an infinity of expressions. This was a mass event that was also intimately personal; it seemed appropriate to greet your neighbor but not to watch too closely for any reactions. Far better to swim your own course through the sound and spirits.” The full review is included in the book Tim Page on Music by Amadeus Press.
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MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIP CITATION
Anna Schuleit
Artist
New York, New York
Anna Schuleit is a young artist who brings back to life historic sites and structures through her original interpretations. In much of her work to date, she has honored the lives lived within mental health institutions by transforming abandoned facilities into moving, site-specific memorials. Employing such ephemeral elements as choral pieces and seas of flowers, her powerful public works are designed to endure not as objects, but as vivid memories for those who experience the multisensory events she orchestrates. For Habeas Corpus (2000), Schuleit filled Massachusetts’ historic Northampton State Hospital with music; from speakers installed throughout the dilapidated building, a recording of J. S. Bach’s Magnificat poured through windows and doors, stirring a rapt audience of former patients, caregivers, and hundreds of others assembled below. Schuleit drew her inspiration for her next major work, Bloom (2003), from the fact that few psychiatric patients ever receive flowers. To mark the closing of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center’s original building in Boston, she and a corps of volunteers blanketed the structure’s empty hallways with vibrantly colored, flowering plants—begonias, lilies, pink heather, tulips—and played recordings of ambient sounds from the hospital’s former life. A work of conceptual clarity, compassion, and beauty, Bloom drew thousands of visitors to tour the installation and to attend an open forum that Schuleit organized to coincide with the celebration. Exploring the structures and settings of the past, their architecture, and their stories, Schuleit’s work pays tribute to forgotten lives and reminds us of our common humanity.
(Information as of September 2006. Source: http://www.macfound.org)
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Vonnegut, Nanette Transcendent and Tenacious, Take Magazine, 10/ 2015
Meier, Allison Artists redesign the Alphabet, Hyperallergic, 7/2015
Piepenbring, Dan A, B, C, and Other News, The Paris Review, 7/2015
Schwarz, Terry ed. A Lake in the Other Room, Article in Urban Infill, Journal of the Cleveland Urban Design Center, Kent State University, 12/2014
Cardiel, Dane Room for Five: Anna Schuleit & The Eastman Composers, Manor House Quarterly, Spring 2013
Morse, Erica Painting in Motion, The All-Nighter, RISD, 10/27/2010
Yung, Susan Here Rests Peggy, PBS Thirteen, SundayArts 10/22/2010
Gendolla, Peter (Editor) Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genre, Medienumbruche / Media Upheaval, 2010
O’Neal, Lauren Sensorial Archives: Subjectivity beyond Visuality—Counter-choreographic Practices in the Work of Xavier Le Roy, Nell Breyer, and Anna Schuleit, European Artistic Research Network, Helsinki, Finland, 2010
Wethli, Mark Visual Extremities: Anna Schuleit and the Art of Looking, Coleman Burke Gallery, exhibition catalog, 2009
