Shimon Attie (born 1957) is a contemporary visual artist based in New York City. He is known for nuanced, often deeply researched projects situated between installation art, video and photography.Kleeblatt, Norman L. "Persistence of Memory," Art in America, June 2000, cover, p. 96–103.Alipour, Yasaman. "Shimon Attie: Facts on the Ground," The Brooklyn Rail, June 3, 2016. Retrieved December 12, 2024.Deb, Sopan. "Cruising New York's Waterways This Week: Portraits of Former Refugees," The New York Times, September 24, 2018. Retrieved December 12, 2024. His work encompasses time-based, site-specific public art, immersive mixed-media installations for exhibition spaces, photographic series that include the documentation of public interventions, monographs and new media.Wallach, Amei. "Writing in Light on the Tenement Walls," The New York Times, September 13, 1998. Retrieved December 12, 2024.Bravo, Tony. "'Night Watch' Transforms San Francisco Bay into Art Installation," San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 2021. Retrieved December 12, 2024.Shapiro, Susan. "Haunted by History," The New York Times, September 25, 1994. Retrieved December 12, 2024. Attie's subject matter centers on marginalized histories and communities, examining instances of trauma, displacement and disenfranchisement while also highlighting themes of community, endurance, perseverance and humanity.Hagen, Charles. "Mixed Images That Show The Mutability of Time," The New York Times, December 9, 1994. Retrieved December 12, 2024.Klemm, Hannah. "Starstruck: An American Tale," in Starstruck: An American Tale, Nicholas Sawicki (ed.), Black Dog Press, 2023. Retrieved December 12, 2024.Williams, Luke. "Welcome to the Neighborhood," SF/Arts, August 24, 2021. Retrieved December 12, 2024. Curator Hannah Klemm wrote, "Attie's practice explores ideas of space, place, social memory and identity. His multifaceted projects shine a light on what has been lost, buried or forgotten … expos[ing] the layers of history that construct our world."
Attie's art belongs to public collections including the Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. Shimon Attie, Artists. Retrieved December 19, 2024. Centre Georges Pompidou,Centre Georges Pompidou. Shimon Attie, The Writing on the Wall, Berlin - Slide Projection of Former Jewish Residents 1932, Collection. Retrieved December 19, 2024. National Gallery of Art,National Gallery of Art. Shimon Attie, Collection. Retrieved December 19, 2024. Art Institute of Chicago,Art Institute of Chicago. Shimon Attie, Artists. Retrieved December 19, 2024. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shimon Attie, Artists. Retrieved December 19, 2024. de Young Museum,Cornell, Daniell. Shimon Attie: Sightings, The Ecology of an Art Museum, San Francisco: de Young Museum, 2008 Jewish Museum,The Jewish Museum. Shimon Attie, Artists. Retrieved December 19, 2024.The Jewish Museum. Shimon Attie, Joachim-Ecke Auguststrasse, Collection. Retrieved December 19, 2024. and Museum of Contemporary Photography.Museum of Contemporary Photography. Shimon Attie, Artists. Retrieved December 19, 2024.Camper, Fred. "Projecting Meaning," Chicago Reader, May 27, 2004. Retrieved December 19, 2024. He has also exhibited at those venues, as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Wexner Center for the Arts, among others.Temin, Christine. "Shimon Attie Brings Haunting Images to ICA," The Boston Globe, December 24, 1999.Wexner Center for the Arts. "Spring 2013:: Shimon Attie: Metro.PAL.IS." Exhibitions. Retrieved December 19, 2024.Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. "Shimon Attie: MetroPAL.IS, Exhibitions, 2011. Retrieved December 19, 2024. Attie has been recognized with Guggenheim and Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowships, a Rome Prize and the Lee Krasner Award (Pollock-Krasner Foundation).John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Shimon Attie, Fellows. Retrieved December 11, 2024.Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Shimon Attie, Fellows. Retrieved December 19, 2024.Van Gelder, Lawrence. " Prizes to Artists and Scholars To Live and Study in Rome," The New York Times, April 20, 2001. Retrieved December 12, 2024.Artforum. "Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards Nearly $3 Million in Grants to Artists and Nonprofits,", May 21, 2020. Retrieved December 12, 2024.
Early life and career Attie was born (1957) and raised in Los Angeles. He initially studied psychology and was a psychotherapist in San Francisco before turning to art and photography; some writers have related this background to his work's longstanding interest in uncovering hidden layers of meaning.Stille, Alexander. "The History of Another," in The History of Another: Projections in Rome, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Photography/Twin Palms Press, 2004.
After completing an MFA at San Francisco State University in 1991, Attie relocated to Berlin to become a full-time artist, inspired by a trip there the prior year shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Rosen, Miriam. "Shimon Attie," Artforum, April 1994. Retrieved December 12, 2024. At a time when European artists were exploring how new media might examine Germany's troubled history, he focused his work on its Jewish community before and during the Nazi era.Young, James Edward. "Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie's Acts of Remembrance, 1991-1996," in At Memory's Edge: after images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture by James Edward Young, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 62–89. Retrieved December 12, 2024. Attie returned to San Francisco in 1996 before moving to New York City the following year.
Work and reception Attie's early projects involved dramatic on-site projections of archival photographs and written documents on contemporary sites and were described as collage-like and ghostly. His method created a confrontation between the physicality of the present and the immateriality and ephemerality of the projected (absent) past, memory and light, recovering histories obscured by time or potentials never achieved. Art in America critic Norman Kleeblatt compared the aesthetic strategies and baroque tableaux of this work to those of Pepón Osorio and Jeff Wall, as well as to the art of Marcel Broodthaers, writing "Attie is first and foremost an artist-anthropologist, a practitioner who digs into archives and then reconfigures his non-artistic source material into complicated artworks." Since 2006, much of Attie's work has involved community-based projects in which he collaborates directly with refugee, immigrant, minority and survivor communities that have suffered trauma.Townsend, Chris. "The Incomplete spectacle: Aberfan in its own image," Art and Death, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008. Retrieved December 12, 2024. These projects often consist of photographic and video or video/performance installations whose deliberate, human-centered tableaux he films with aesthetics influenced by old master painting.Hanhardt, John. "Outside Time: The Art of Shimon Attie," Racing Clocks Run Slow: Archaeology of a Race Track, Bridgehampton, NY, 2008 Quick, Genevieve. "Afloat on the Bay, 'Night Watch' Presented Refugees as They Are," 48 Hills, September 22, 2021. Retrieved December 12, 2024.
Photographic and public art projects, (1991–2005) Attie attracted wide attention for projects in the 1990s that represented the experience of Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazi regime, the most prominent being a haunting photographic series and monograph, The Writing on the Wall (1992–93).Hodes, Laura. "Shimon Attie Projects Past Into Present," Forward, November 16, 2012. Retrieved December 19, 2024. After combing historical archives, he projected black-and-white, pre-Holocaust photographs he found of Jewish street life onto identical or nearby building fronts in East Berlin's run-down former Jewish Quarter at life-size scale, then photographed the results in color at night. The projections of Yiddish-language businesses and everyday people seemingly oblivious to the camera (and their impending fate) both blended into and uneasily jostled against color surroundings of contemporary vehicles, billboards and graffiti. Critics described the results as "sad, eerie collages of time," that gave visual form to an invisible, obliterated past yet also lent the subjects an immediate, present-day universality. New York Times critic Charles Hagen described Attie's technique as "uncanny, creating the sense that the surfaces of the scenes themselves are being peeled back like old wallpaper to reveal the history buried beneath them." In a more open-ended series, "The History of Another" (2002–03), Attie projected photographs of various marginalized populations in turn-of-the-20th-century Rome onto contemporary sites, using the city's overlay of 2,700 years of architecture to raise questions about which groups are included or excluded from history.Israel, Nico. "Shimon Attie," Artforum, December 2004. Retrieved December 12, 2024.
In several projects, Attie turned to the experiences of still-living immigrant populations. "Sites Unseen" (1995–96) was a series of four public installations across European cities that addressed site-specific sociopolitical moments of the past and present.Klemm, Hannah. Shimon Attie: Lost in Space, Saint Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum, 2017. It included Portraits of Exile (1995)—an installation of nine large light boxes submerged underwater in a canal in front of the Danish parliament. The embedded close-up portraits of the series connected the dramatic 1943 Danish rescue of Jews on fishing boats to the country's housing of present-day asylum seekers in crowded container ships in Copenhagen harbor. For his first American public project, the site-specific laser installation Between Dreams and History (1998, Creative Time), Attie collected handwritten memories, dreams and prayers from the diverse communities of Manhattan's Lower East Side, seeking to give voice to the collective poetics of their immigrant experiences. He then used a custom animated projection program to write the messages out of thin air out in laser light onto neighborhood buildings, letter by letter and in their native languages.
In a departure, Attie's "Untitled Memory" series (1998) turned from public memory to a more intimate, personal key in which he overlaid projected, elegiac images of solitary friends and family onto his own former domestic spaces and photographed the results.Baker, Kenneth. "Photographing Phantoms / Shimon Attie captures ghostly projections of memory in his latest work," San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 1999. Retrieved December 12, 2024.
Community and site-based projects (2006–present)