Michael Joo Named Spring 2020 Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist

Michael Joo will serve as the Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist for Spring 2020. He will speak at 6p February 3 as part of the Sam Fox School Public Lecture Series.

Born in Ithaca, New York, in 1966, Joo studied art at Washington University in St. Louis (BFA89) and at Yale School of Art (MFA91). He has been based in New York since 1991. Since then he has had numerous solo and group gallery and institutional exhibitions of his work, including at The Menil Collection, Serpentine Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, Rodin Gallery (Samsung Foundation), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and the Freer|Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, among others.

In his work, Joo combines and contrasts materials from nature and culture to question form and material, further asking fundamental questions about identity and the human condition, such as: “of what are we made; how do we relate to our environment; and, are we a part of, or apart from nature?”

In 2001 Joo and Doho Suh represented Korea at the Venice Biennale, and Joo was a co-recipient of the grand prize at the 2006 Gwangju Biennial. His works are held in numerous public collections around the world, including the Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Guggenheim Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Savannah College of Art and Design, the Israel Museum, Moderna Museet Stockholm, UCLA Hammer Museum, and Walker Art Center. He has written reviews and essays for numerous art magazines and publications, and had several monographs of his artwork published, including one from of his 2016 exhibition at Blain|Southern, London, as well as a recent catalog from his 2018 show at Kukje Gallery. He has curated exhibitions over the years, from Deterritorialization of Process (2000) at Artists Space in New York, to Too Full to Cry (2019) at Shin Gallery, New York.

Awards include a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1998. Joo currently teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts and Yale School of Art.