Marian Zazeela
Marian Zazeela ( born April 15, 1940 in the Bronx, New York) is an American painter, lighting, performance and installation artist, designer and musician.
Life and work
Marian Zazeela was born to Russian Jewish parents in the Bronx. She received her training at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts and at Bennington College, where she studied with Paul Feeley, Eugene C. Goossen and Tony Smith. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with a focus on painting in 1960.
Shortly after graduation worked on stage for Amiri Baraka ( LeRoi Jones) The System of Dante 's Hell in New York and worked as an actress and model for Jack Smith worked ( in his film Flaming Creatures and for the photo book The Beautiful Book). In 1962 she met the composer La Monte Young, with whom she lives and worked ever since.
In the early 60s, she was involved as a singer of La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music Group Music. (to which also, at various times, the photographer Billy Name, the minimalist musician Terry Riley, the musician John Cale, the video artist and musician Tony Conrad, and the poet and musician Angus MacLise ). They also designed the light shows for the group.
Your artistic works from her early - more expressionistic - time are of calligraphic paintings and drawings, which then give way to a psychedelic aspect and later developed in the direction of Op Art.
In 1965, she began her work with complex Ornamental Lightyears Tracery and their light and sound installations. She had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright -Knox Art Gallery, in the Maeght Foundation, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Haus der Kunst in Munich and at the Dia Art Foundation and numerous other galleries and venues.
In the next 30 years she created her work more and more in the direction of Environment and sculptural forms, often in the use of colored light and colored shadows, for example, adaptation Dusk Environment (installation), Still Light (sculpture), Magenta Day / magenta Night ( installation / sculpture ) and more generally: Light.
In the late 1960s began her Zazeela light work in close collaboration to design with the minimalist music of Young as installations and performance "Dream Houses". In 1972, she appeared with a " Dream House " - performance and installation at the Documenta 5 in Kassel (together with La Monte Young) in the Department of Individual Mythologies: Overview - Performances - Activities - Changes from July 30 to 7 in each of 15:00 to 18:00 on clock. One of the " Dream House " works running in the 275 Church Street in New York since the early 1990s and is open to the public three days a week.
In 1970 Zazeela began studying classical Hindu music with Pandit Pran Nath. It occurs as a musician and has published writings. In 2000, a monograph on their drawings in Germany was issued.
Literature and sources
- Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
- Documenta Archiv (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X