Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni was born in in 1964 in Freeport, Bahamas. She lives and works in New York. She received her bachelor from Sarah Lawrence College in New York and earned her Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989.

Antoni sees her work as an ongoing process like the daily tasks our lives are – largely – made up of. Her work consists of turning these tasks into sculptural processes in which she explores the possibilities offered by the body to create meaning. Curator Richard Julin asked the artists participating in the Free Port exhibition held in 2001 to take Frihamnen (the Stockholm harbor site of Magasin III whose name means “Free port”) as their broad theme. The exhibition explored Magasin III from a historical and site-specific perspective. Antoni retur¬ned to her place of birth, which just happens to be the town of Freeport in the Bahamas. She gathered together material from friends and family and – using material objects as diverse as cat hair and lace, shoelaces and crisp bags – the artist created a 78 meter-long rope woven through with stories and memories. Moor is a work of art in a state of permanent change – every time the rope is exhibited new components are added, new life-fragments are intertwined.

Antoni’s solo exhibitions include Accelerator, Stockholm (2018); Institute of International Visual Arts, London (2005, 2004); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2002); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1998). Group exhibitions include Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2020); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2016); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2014); New Museum, New York (2013); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007). She has also exhibited at documenta 14, Kassel (2017), as well as the Biennales held in Venice (1993), Johannesburg (1995), and Istanbul (1997).

Antoni is the recipient of several prestigious awards including Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2014); Creative Capital Artist Grant (2012) and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2011).

Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Sammlung Goetz, Munich and Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo.