Andrea Fraser

Andrea Fraser
Born	1965 (age 51–52) Billings, Montana, United States
Nationality	American
Known for	Performance art

Andrea Fraser (born 1965) is a performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of institutional critique. Fraser is based in New York and Los Angeles and is currently a new genres professor of the Art Department faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Fraser was born in Billings, Montana and grew up in Berkeley, California. She attended New York University, the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program, and the School of Visual Arts.

Fraser began writing art criticism before incorporating a similar analysis into her artistic practice.

Fraser's brand of performance during the 1990s popularized the institutional critique art movement, a loosely formed artistic practice meant to critique the very institutions that are involved in the sale, display, and commerce of art. Fraser's work typically comments on the politics, commerce, histories, and even the self-assuredness of the modern-day art museum, including the hierarchies and the exclusion mechanisms of art as an enterprise. Her performances, despite having serious undertones, are often presented in a humorous, ridiculous, or satirical manner. She has performed solo work at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Dia Art Foundation, New York; the mumok, Vienna; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other venues.

Fraser was a founding member of the feminist performance group, The V-Girls (1986-1996); the project-based artist initiative Parasite (1997-1998); and the cooperative art gallery Orchard (2005-2008). She was also co-organizer, with Helmut Draxler, of Services, a “working-group exhibition” that has been conceived at Kunstraum of Lüneburg University and toured to eight venues in Europe and the United States between 1994 and 2001.

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