Barbara Degenevieve
| Barbara DeGenevieve | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
May 21, 1947 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Died | August 4, 2014 (aged 67) Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of New Mexico |
| Known for | Photography, video, and performance art |
| Notable work | The Panhandler Project, |
| Website | cargocollective |
Barbara DeGenevieve (1947–2014) was an American interdisciplinary artist who worked in photography, video, and performance. She lectured widely on her work and on subjects including human sexuality, gender, transsexuality, censorship, ethics, and pornography. Her writing on these subjects have been published in art, photographic, and scholarly journals, and her work has been exhibited internationally.
DeGenevieve studied photography at the University of New Mexico receiving her MFA in 1980, and began teaching at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign immediately following. She taught at San Jose State University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of Art before joining the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. DeGenevieve was a professor and chair of the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute.
Much of DeGenevieve's art explored the connections among dominance, power, and sex, including their inverse relationships. This led DeGenevieve into controversy, particularly during the National Endowment for the Arts funding scandals of the early 1990s (widely known as "the culture wars") when she, Andres Serrano, and Merry Alpern were stripped of their grants from the NEA in 1994. She spoke on many occasions on issues of censorship as a direct result. On some occasions she used performative texts or poems, gothic costume, and theatrical tactics to amplify her point. She might speak in character as parody or as the subject of her discourse, but always with a sense of humor and charity for her subject. She continued to court controversy, having established an interdisciplinary and new media arts program at SAIC that instructs students on constructing sexually graphic artworks.
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