Alexandra Grant

Alexandra Grant (born 1973 in Fairview Park, Ohio) is a Los Angeles-based artist, who uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for imagery in sculpture, painting, drawing, and video.

Grant graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in 1994, and from California College of the Arts with a MFA in 2000.

Grant’s first solo exhibition at a museum was in 2007, organized by curator Alma Ruiz, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). A catalog from the exhibition features Grant’s large-scale works on paper, an essay on Grant’s work by Ruiz, and an essay that inspired Grant by Hélène Cixous the French writer and philosopher. [citation needed]

Grant is known as a ‘radical collaborator’ – the longest of her exchanges being with the pioneering writer of hypertext fiction, Michael Joyce. The paintings and sculpture based on Joyce’s texts (using them as scores or scripts to interpret rather than follow) have been the subject of at least three series: the Ladder Quartet (shown at MOCA in 2007), the Six Portals (shown at Honor Fraser gallery in 2008), and Bodies (shown at Honor Fraser gallery in 2010).

In early 2011, Gerhard Steidl published the Ode to Happiness, her first collaboration with Keanu Reeves. It was Grant’s first artist book and Reeves’ first book as a writer.

In 2013, Grant collaborated on twin series of exhibitions with Cixous, based on that writer’s book Philippines. “Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest” took place first at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and at Mains d’Oeuvres in Saint-Ouen, France.1 Hundreds of people joined Grant in creating large-scale drawings of Cixous’s novel, which touched on many themes including telepathy in Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Sigmund Freud’s work. Grant and Cixous spoke about their telepathic relationship in 2013 as part of a conversation from Mains d’Oeuvres to Nottingham Contemporary in 2016, 18th Street Arts Center published the “Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest” to thank the many participants in the project, a catalog which includes photographs of both exhibitions, and essays by Cixous, Grant, curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Robert Nashak, and a transcription of the 2013 conversation with Cixous.

Grant continued her stylistic evolution in 2013, when she began showing works from her “Century of the Self” works, first at USC’s Fisher Museum in 2013’s “Drawn to Language, at Lora Reynold’s Gallery in Austin, TX in 2014, in 2015 at the exhibition “We Must Risk Delight: 20 Artists from Los Angeles” at the Venice Biennial and in a two-person exhibition with Steve Roden at the Pasadena Museum of California Art “These Carnations Defy Language.” These works are inspired by the documentary film “Century of the Self” by BBC documentarian Adam Curtis.

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