Shimon Attie is a visual artist whose practice includes photography, video, immersive mixed-media installations, site-specific works in public places, and new media pieces. In many of his projects, Attie employs a variety of media to animate sites with images that reference lost histories or speculative futures. This has included introducing the histories and narratives of marginalized and/or forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. In other, often video works, Attie engages local communities in finding new ways of representing their history, memory, and potential futures. Ultimately, Attie’s work explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relation-ships between space, time, place, and identity.
Shimon Attie's work has been exhibited and collected by numerous museums around the world, including by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The National Gallery in Washington DC, the ICA in Boston, and the Miami Art Museum, among many others. In addition, he has received numerous visual artist fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, artist grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a Visual Artist Fellowship from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute and from the National Endowment for the Arts, among many others.
Five monographs have been published on Attie's work, which has also been the subject of a number of films that have aired on PBS, BBC, and ARD. Since receiving his MFA Degree in 1991, he has realized approximately 30 major projects in ten countries around the world. In 2013/19, Attie was awarded the Lee Krasner Achievement Award and in 2018, was inducted as a “National Academician” into the National Academy of Design. In 2020, Shimon Attie was appointed as the inaugural Charles C. Bergman Endowed Visiting Professor of Studio Art at Stony Brook University and in 2021 as the Horger Artist-in-Residence at Lehigh University. In 2021, Here, not Here was Attie’s debut solo exhibition with Catharine Clark Gallery and the first comprehensive survey exhibition of his work on the West Coast.
Night Watch: Also in 2021, BOXBLUR of Catharine Clark Gallery and Immersive Arts Alliance debuted the west coast presentation of Shimon Attie’s Night Watch, a floating media installation that travelled the San Francisco Bay. The floating installation combined contemporary LED-technology with a historic mode of water transport – a barge – to create a sophisticated and layered artistic and sculptural work of art.
Night Watch featured twelve close-up video portraits of refugees who were granted political asylum in the United States. Displayed on a 20 ft-wide high-resolution LED-screen, which travelled along the San Francisco Bay aboard a slow-moving barge to allow for on-shore public viewing, the silent portraits featured largely members of international LGBTQI communities, as well as unaccompanied minors, who fled tremendous violence and discrimination in their homelands of Columbia, Honduras, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Peru, and Russia.
