Jimmie durham artist biography
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Teacher Guide:
Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World
Nov 3, 2017
Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World
"I feel fairly sure that I could address the entire world if only I had a place to stand." —Jimmie Durham, “The Ground Has Been Covered,” 1988
Jimmie Durham (b. 1940) has worked as a visual artist, activist, performer, essayist, and poet for more than forty-five years. One of the most inventive American artists working today, Durham has produced wryly political art over the last four decades. Using materials as varied as animal skulls, oil barrels, stone, and olive wood, he approaches his subjects with a potent blend of poetry and humor.
Durham started making art in the mid-1960s, leaving the United States to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1969. There he worked primarily in performance and sculpture and became increasingly interested in the possibility of integrating art into public life. Focusing his attention on activism when he return
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Jimmie Durham
Jimmie Durham was an artist, poet, writer, and activist whose work deconstructs the stereotypes and prejudices on which Western culture is based. Durham's work analyzes the relationships between history and environment, architecture and monumentality, and critical attitudes towards political structures of power and narratives of national identity. In his sculptures, drawings, texts, and rulle and film works, Durham described behaviors and norms of coexistence in different social and cultural formations.
Durham's career as both a sculptor and a political activist began in the early 1960s, exploring the relationships between people and the architectures, both physical and societal, that surround us. He worked in a range of traditional and unique media, resulting in both small sculptures and large-scale installations. In the 1970s Durham co-founded the International Indian Treaty Council at the United Nations, where his work led to the Declaration on the Rights
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Jimmie Durham
Jimmie Durham was born in 1940 in the US.
In 1963 Durham’s strong interest in the civil rights movement led him into performance, theatre and literature. Encouraged by the African American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Vivian Ayers, Durham held his first performance at the Arena Theatre in Houston in 1963. He also started to publish poetry in progressive magazines and alternative newspapers. After these first forays into the arts Durham enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin, where he exhibited his work in 1965. Hemoved to Geneva in 1969 and enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, where he focused on performance and abstract sculpture.
In 1973 Durham moved back to the US and became a full-time organiser for the American Indian Movement and, a year later, a member of its Central Council. In 1974 Durham was appointed Executive Director of the newly established International Indian Treaty Council and moved to New York. From 1975 to 1980