David Antin

David Abram Antin (February 1, 1932 – October 11, 2016) was an American poet, critic and performance artist.

Antin was born in New York City in 1932. He earned his B.A. from City College of New York in 1955 and his M.A. from New York University in 1966. He spent the first ten years of his career (1955-1964) as a translator of both scientific texts and fiction. By the late 1950s he had begun to experiment with writing fiction and poetry, with his first published work appearing in the Kenyon Review in 1959. By the early 1960s, Antin had developed significantly, both as a poet and as an art critic, and it has been said that his articles about Andy Warhol and Robert Morris (in 1965) were among the first truly analytical writings about either artist.

In the late 1960s, Antin began performing extemporaneously, improvising "talk poems" at readings and exhibitions. In the late 1960s Antin moved with his wife, the writer and performance artist Eleanor Antin, to Southern California to take up a post at the University of California, San Diego, in the newly formed and experimental Visual Arts Department. He served for a time as gallery director and much longer as a professor there. In the early 1970s, his influence on a nascent group of conceptual photographers among the graduate students there was powerful. He has a fellowship in the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEH. He also received the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984. In 2008, Antin was a featured performer at the &NOW Festival at Chapman University.

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