Judy Fiskin

Judy Fiskin (born April 1, 1945 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist working in photography and video, and a member of the art school faculty at California Institute of the Arts. Her videos have been screened in the Documentary Fortnight series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; her photographs have been shown at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, at The New Museum in New York City, and at the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Judy Fiskin grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Pomona College, where her classmates included future artists Chris Burden and James Turrell. She got a master's degree in art history at UCLA, compiled and edited the journals of Richard Neutra, and was co-director of Womanspace Gallery in the mid-1970s. She started teaching photography in the art school at Cal Arts in 1977. In addition to her photography and video, she's also an award-winning writer for her essay "Borges, Stryker, Evans: The Sorrows of Representation."

Since her first show at Castelli Graphics in New York City in 1976, Fiskin's photographs have had the same distinctive format: small black-and-white images, two and one-half inches square, printed on letter-sized white paper. She began with vernacular architecture in Los Angeles and gained critical attention for her "Dingbat" series, anonymous small 1950s apartment buildings (of the dingbat type) in Los Angeles shot from across the street in a deadpan style. Other series focused on desert scenes, military buildings, and period furniture. In 1992, MOCA in Los Angeles held a mid-career retrospective for Fiskin; critics praised the intelligence, wit, and stylistic coherence of her work. Her photographs have been exhibited widely, including the Pompidou Center in Paris displaying 24 prints as part of their historic 2006 exhibit, "Los Angeles 1955-1985, Birth of an Art Capital," and MOCA Los Angeles displayed 15 prints in their 2009-2010 show "Collection: MOCA's First 30 Years." Her photos were shown at five Pacific Standard Time exhibitions in 2011 and 2012: "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-81," at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; "In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980," at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; "It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973," at Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; "Seismic Shift: California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984" at the California Museum of Photography at UC Riverside, and "Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the Watts Towers Arts Center" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles. One of Fiskin's photos was featured in the Los Angeles Times article "50 Masterpieces at LACMA" in 2015.

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