Dara Birnbaum
| Dara Birnbaum | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 1946 (age 70–71) New York, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | installation artist, video artist |
| Movement | Feminist art movement |
Dara Birnbaum (born 1946) is an American video and installation artist who lives and works in New York (USA). Birnbaum entered the nascent field of video art in the mid-to-late 1970s challenging the gendered biases of the period and television’s ever-growing presence within the American household. Her oeuvre primarily addresses ideological and aesthetic features of mass media through the intersection of video art and television. She uses video to reconstruct television imagery using materials such as archetypal formats as quizzes, soap operas, and sports programmes. Her techniques involve the repetition of images and interruption of flow with text and music. She is also well known for forming part of the feminist art movement that emerged within video art in the mid-1970s.
Dara Birnbaum was born in 1946 in New York. She received her BA in architecture at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1969 and subsequently worked in the Lawrence Halprin & Associates architectural firm in New York City. Her work with the firm instilled a lifelong consideration of civic space and exploration of the relationship between private and public spheres in mass culture. Soon after she decided to study art and graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973 with a BFA in painting.
In 1975 Birnbaum moved to Florence for a year and was introduced to video art by the Centro Diffusione Grafica, a gallery that pioneered video art exhibitions. Shortly after her return to New York City in 1976, Birnbaum met Dan Graham, an artist/critic who greatly impacted her artistic development. He introduced her to Screen (journal), a British film-theory journal, which provided a critical analysis of mainstream cinema during the 1970s. Birnbaum was very interested in the journal’s discussion of an emerging feminist context in the critique of cinema but found Screen (journal) to be flawed in its failure to consider television—a medium she believed to have replaced film as the dominant force of American mass culture.
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