Stephen Prina: Retrospection Under Duress, Reprise

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is pleased to present a truncated, fragmentary, and abridged survey of work by Stephen Prina, newly appointed Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies.

Tom Holert says of Vinyl II, a film by Stephen Prina: "…Prina much prefers the appellation "cultural producer" to "artist," valuing the special force and clumsiness of the term—a term that lends itself to the problematization of cultural expectations and the ideological maneuvers involved in fulfilling them. What is expected? By whom and why? What is the nature of the disappointment that results from the mismatch between a name and an image, a signature and a style? And what does it look like when Prina makes such a disappointment productive?"Artforum May 2000

Stephen Prina

Prina's work includes artist books, film, music, painting, photography, sculpture, and recently, jewelry. Two survey exhibitions of his work have been staged: It was the best he could do at the moment, Museum Boijmans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1992, and To the People of Frankfurt am Main: At Least Three Types of Inaccessibility, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2000. He has made solo exhibitions in Berlin, Chicago, Cologne, Geneva, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Seoul, and Vienna, and participated in group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He participated in Documenta IX; 51^st Carnegie International; the Venice Biennale XLIV; the 8^th Sydney Biennale; Prospect 89, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; as well as The BiNational: American Art of the Late 80s at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and L.A.: Hot and Cool: The Eighties, MIT, List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. His work is represented by Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York. Concerts of Prina's music have been staged in Athens, Beacon, Berlin, Boston, Dijon, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Humlebaek, Los Angeles, New York, and Seoul. He has recorded and performed with The Red Krayola since 1994. Recordings of his music are available on Drag City, Chicago, and organ of corti, Malibu. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Visual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Englehard Foundation Fellowship, a Künstelerhaus Bethanian Phillip Morris Kunstförderung, and a Foundation for Art Resources Grant.