Dorit Cypis (; born 1951, Tel Aviv) is a Canadian-American artist, mediator and educator based in Los Angeles.Johnson, Reed. "‘Rethinking Borders’: Urging both sides to an understanding," Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2011. Retrieved October 7, 2020.Kobialka, Michal. "Aya Dorit Cypis," COLA 07, Los Angeles: Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, 2007 Retrieved October 5, 2020, p. 19–21. Her work has collectively explored themes of identity, history and social relations through installation art, photography, performance and social practice.Armstrong, Elizabeth. "Girl, Unmasked," Girl's Night Out, Elizabeth Armstrong and Irene Hoffman, Santa Ana, CA: Orange County Museum of Art, 2003.Rothfuss, Joan and Elizabeth Carpenter. Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole: Walker Art Center collections, Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. p. 180, 2005.Cai, Judy. "Understanding Conflict through Art," NeonTommy, Annenberg Media Center, November 11, 2014. Retrieved October 7, 2020. After graduating from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), she attracted attention in the 1980s and 1990s for her investigations of the female body, presented in immersive installation-performances at the Whitney Museum,Furlong, Lucinda. "Dorit Cypis," The New American Filmmakers Series, (No. 40), New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. International Center of Photography,Ledes, Richard C. "Dorit Cypis," Artforum, January 1990, p. 139. Retrieved October 5, 2020. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),Reveau, Tony. "Fleeting Phantoms: 'The Projected Image' at SFMOMA," Artweek, March 28, 1991, p. 20–1. and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.Hagen, Charles. "Turning the Lens Inward," The New York Times, September 22, 1991, Sect. 2, p. 34. Retrieved October 5, 2020. Counter to much feminist work of the time, Cypis focused on interiority and personal mythologies rather than exterior political realms, and according to art historian Elizabeth Armstrong, made a significant contribution to discourse about the representation of women and female sexuality.Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "Sexual Difference: Both Sides of the Camera," New York: Columbia University, Wallach Art Gallery, 1988.Campbell, Clayton. "Dorit Cypis and Hildegard Duane at Jancar Gallery," Artweek, August 23, 2009.
Cypis's work has often moved between studio and social practice, including the direction and creation of initiatives in Minneapolis and Los Angeles bridging art and social change.Sugand, Dyvia. "Peacebuilding Through an Artist’s Perspective, Member Spotlight: Dorit Cypis," Mediators Beyond Borders International, October 19, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2020. As a mediator, she has worked in the Middle East and Los Angeles on conflict engagement issues including Arab-Jewish and police-community relations.Carey, Brainard. "Dorit Cypis," WYBC Yale Radio, June 30, 2017. Retrieved October 9, 2020. Her later art has shifted toward broader considerations of identity related to history, memory, space and geopolitics, and been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Orange County Museum of Art. Cypis has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and City of Los Angeles, among others.Artforum. "2014 Guggenheim Fellows Announced," News. April 10, 2014. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Heffley, Lynne. "L.A. artists receive $10,000 grants," Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2006. Retrieved October 7, 2020.Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. "Meet the Artists: Rauschenberg Residency 9." November 7, 2014. Retrieved October 7, 2020.
Early life and career Aya Dorit Cypis was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1951.Hartshorn, Willis. The Naked Nude, New York: International Center of Photography (ICP), 1989. In 1958, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada.Helleckson, Diane. "The Naked Truth," St. Paul Pioneer Press, October 10, 1992. After exploring sociology at Sir George Williams University, she graduated with degrees in art education and fine art in 1974 from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, studying with conceptual artists Garry Neill Kennedy and David Askevold.Heartney, Eleanor. Dorit Cypis: X-Rayed, (altered), Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, Anderson Gallery, 1990.Griffin, Kevin. "Art Seen: Garry Neil Kennedy changed the art rules in Canada in the '60s," Vancouver Sun, October 30, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2020. In 1977, she completed an MFA at Cal Arts, whose faculty at the time included Michael Asher and John Baldessari;Myers, Holly. "David Askevold made it all perfectly unclear," Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2012. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Oursler, Tony. "Tony Oursler," Artforum, May 2012. Retrieved October 5, 2020. among her early work was the feminist performative video, Exploring Comfort.Wark, Jayne. Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006, p. 190–1.National Gallery of Canada. Exploring Comfort, Dorit Cypis, Collection. Retrieved October 7, 2020.
After graduating, Cypis directed Foundation for Art Resources (FAR), a Los Angeles nonprofit that partnered artists with private and public organizations to site art within the city from 1976 to 2016.Umolo, Yesomi. "Identity and Institutionalization: Dorit Cypis on Minneapolis in the '80s," Sightlines, Walker Art Center, 2012. Retrieved October 6, 2020. She exhibited widely, including shows at The Clocktower Gallery, Artists Space and White Columns in New York and LACE in Los Angeles.Norklun, Kathi. "Courage," Real Life Magazine, Summer 1983, p. 19–21. In 1983, she moved to Minneapolis, and joined the faculty at Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1983–8). She eventually attracted wider attention for increasingly politicized work that was influenced by cinema, music and dance, with shows at the Whitney Museum, New Museum, SFMOMA, and Walker Art Center, among others.Bonetti, David. "The Painted Word, ICA hangs a catalogue," The Boston Phoenix, February 12, 1988. She also founded Kulture Klub Collaborative, a project involving artists and homeless teens that bridged creative expression and survival.Ferris, Allison. Memorable Histories and Historic Memories, Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1998.Kulture Klub Collaborative. "About." Retrieved October 19, 2020.Hudson, Danae. "Partner Post: Kulture Klub Collaborative," YouthLink. October 20, 2016. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
After returning to Los Angeles in 1999, Cypis taught at institutions including USC, CalArts, UCLA, and Otis College of Art and Design until 2018.Otis College of Art and Design. Dorit Cypis. Retrieved October 7, 2020. In 2005, she completed a master's degree in Dispute Resolution (MDR) at Pepperdine University and has since worked as a mediator.John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Dorit Cypis, Fellows. Retrieved October 6, 2020.
Early performance, mixed-media artwork and social practice Critics aligned the strategies of Cypis's early work (e.g., In Quest of the Impresario: Courage, 1982) with feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger and Dara Birnbaum, who sought to unmask and disrupt patriarchal systems of viewing and representation.Linker, Kate."Eluding Definition," Artforum, December 1984, p. 61–7. Retrieved October 5, 2020. By the mid-1980s, however, she moved beyond appropriation and pastiche to a deeper psychophysical engagement with the female body, representation and sexual identity, confronting social conventions with strategies of provocation, defamiliarization and stream-of-conscious association.Heartney, Eleanor. "Art in the 90s: A mixed prognosis," New Art Examiner, May 1990, p. 24–6.Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "Beyond the Simulation Principle," Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1988.Jones, Amelia. "Intersubject- and Interobject-ivity in Dorit Cypis's Angel of Histories," Angel of Histories, Riverside, CA: University of California, Sweeney Art Gallery, 2000. She integrated photomontage and projection, performance and movement, sound and spectator involvement, often upending the roles of viewer and viewed. Writer Abigail Solomon-Godeau singled out this work as grounded in a "utopianism of the body" that staked out a corporeal reality beyond idealized, repressive representations as a site of self-possession and self-knowledge.
In multi-slide and sound pieces including Love After Death (1986), Cypis overlaid emotionally and psychologically loaded imagery—erotic photographs, borrowings from media, medicine, religion and Renaissance painting, haunting family snapshots, exotic travel slides—to create phantasmagoric installations that engulfed performers and spectators in a fluctuating tableau of audio and visual stimuli.Riddle, Mason. "Dorit Cypis," Artforum, March 1987, p. 135–6. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Jardine, Alice. "Alice in Wonderland Looking/For The Body," Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1988.Domandi, Mary-Charlotte. "Dorit Cypis: Singing the Body Electric," Aperture, Winter 1990, p. 66–70. Rather than re-invoke dominant cultural tropes, her imagery suggested multiple, equivalent meanings, role reversals involving gender and agency, and a concept of "self" extending beyond one's body and lifetime to other generations and the collective unconscious (e.g., Lucy and the Vampire; A Sacred Prostitute (one in herself), 1990).Joselit, David. "Saying the Unspeakable," Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1988.
Cypis faced controversy for addressing themes of sexuality during an era of heightened culture-war tensions around art, sexuality, the AIDS crisis, funding and censorship.Muchnic, Suzanne. "NEA and the Arts: The Turmoil Continues; 'Witnesses' Show Presents AIDS as a Complex Issue," Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1989. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Leo, Vince. "Interview with Dorit Cypis," Artpaper, March 1990.Reid, Calvin. "Beyond Mourning," Art in America, April 1990, p. 51–6. Her installation X-Rayed (1988, Whitney Museum) incorporated sound, performance and more than 300 images—one-third depicting a naked woman exploring her body through looking at book images and at herself. Challenging stereotypes, it explored both empowerment—whether a woman can possess her body while being looked at—and thorny, socially conditioned feelings of shame, guilt and repulsion; such feelings extended to the work's subject, who reacted publicly and threatened litigation to block its future presentation. A year later, Cypis produced X-Rayed, (altered), replicating the original images by substituting her own naked body for the model's. Artweek'''s Tony Reveaux described its choreography of imagery and gazes (of Cypis, the camera, and viewer) as "a beguiling and unnerving walk-through cubist self-portrait of sexual recognition and identity."