MoAD’s physical building may be closed due to the mandatory shelter-in-place, but you can still get your fill of art and artists of the African Diaspora. Twice monthly, join MoAD staff members as we visit some of our favorite artists in their studios to see what they’re currently working on and how their work is changing as a result of the quarantine. This is a rare opportunity to hear from artists directly from their studios. We will follow all talks with an audience Q&A.

Shimon Attie is a visual artist, whose practice includes creating permanent and temporary site-specific installations in public places, immersive mixed-media installations for museums and galleries, art photographs, and new media works.

In many of his projects, Attie has used a variety of media to animate sites with images of their 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.

Whether working with public sites or in museums and galleries, Attie’s work explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships 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. Finally, in 2020, Shimon Attie was appointed as the inaugural Charles C. Bergman Endowed Visiting Professor of Studio Art at Stony Brook University and as the Horger Artist-in-Residence at Lehigh University.

Generous support for this series provided by the Westridge Foundation.

Funding has been provided by California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.