Laurie Anderson

American, born 1947

(not assigned)New York, New York

SchoolPerfomance Art

Biography(b Chicago, 5 June 1947).
American performance artist, sculptor, draughtsman and writer. She completed her BA in art history at Barnard College, New York, in 1969 and had her first one-woman show there in 1970, exhibiting sculptures and drawings among other works. She then trained as a sculptor at Columbia University, New York, receiving her MFA in 1972. Her first performance, in which 'music' was played on car horns, took place in 1972 at Town Green in Rochester, NY. She continued to work primarily as a performance artist, using photographs, films, projected texts and, above all, music to create sophisticated and precisely staged events. The most complex and spectacular of these, United States, first performed in full at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York in 1983, was a four-part compendium of spoken texts and songs in which she addressed themes that she continued to explore in her later work, notably the use and abuse of language and of political power in its many forms. (Source: No author, "Laurie Anderson," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press, Accessed June 16, 2004) )

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