Eleanor Antin
| Eleanor Antin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Eleanor Fineman February 27, 1935 Bronx, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse(s) | David Antin; 1 child |
Eleanor Antin (née Fineman; February 27, 1935) is an American performance artist, film-maker, installation artist, conceptual artist and feminist artist.
Eleanor Fineman was born in the Bronx on February 27, 1935. Her parents, Sol Fineman and Jeanette Efron, were Polish Jews who had recently immigrated to the United States.
She attended Music and Art High School in the Harlem, (W. 135th Street and Convent Avenue,) New School for Social Research, and then City College of New York, graduating in 1958.
There she met David Antin, a poet who would become her husband in 1961. She studied acting and had some roles, including performing in a staged reading with Ossie Davis at the first NAACP convention. She and her husband moved to San Diego in 1969.
She taught at the University of California at Irvine from 1974-79, and from 1979 was professor of visual arts at the University of California at San Diego.
When she began her artistic career in New York, she started off as a painter and later turned to making assemblages, but starting in the 1960s she began to do the conceptual projects that would become her focus. The first was Blood of a Poet Box (1965-1968), in which she took blood samples from poets and put them on slides. The work, which was inspired by Jean Cocteau's film Blood of a Poet, eventually held 100 samples, including blood from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and is in the collection of the Tate Modern.
In 1969 she created a portrait, Molly Barnes, out of "a lush lavender bath rug, a noisy electric Lady Schick razor, a patch of spilled talcum powder and a scattering of pink and yellow pills."Molly Barnes was just one of a series of "semantic portraits of people, sometimes real, some-times fictional, [made] out of configurations of brand-new consumer goods" that Antin created.
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