Eleanor Antin
1935–
Since the late 1960s, Eleanor Antin’s work in film, video, performance, and installation art has questioned the immutability of identity. Expanding upon the insistence of the women’s movement that traditional gender roles are socially determined rather than innate, in the mid-1970s Antin began to imagine, in art, a range of possible subjectivities for herself. Commenting that the “usual aids to self-definition,” such as sex, age, talent, and even time and space, “are merely tyrannical limitations upon my freedom of choice,” she slid in and out of a set of archetypal “selves” informed by complex, fictitious narratives, costumes, and makeup.
Myself—1855 resembles a photo- album page, with a handwritten caption in faded ink and a portrait photograph of Antin in the role of Eleanor Nightingale, a fictionalized version of the founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale. Working with a group of friends dressed in period costume, Antin staged elaborate scenes from Nightingale’s life, which she captured in two suites of photographs, some stained with coffee to lend them a vintage patina. The first, The Nightingale Family Album, to which this image belongs, depicts the leisure pursuits of the Victorian aristocracy that Nightingale left behind and her metamorphosis into a caregiver. The second, My Tour of Duty in the Crimea, portrays Nightingale’s exploits in the Crimean War, the conflict during which she secured her reputation. Together the suites form the series The Angel of Mercy. Alternately somber and funny, the project addresses topics from class and gender to charity and cruelty, using Nightingale’s life and times as a lens through which to consider identity and subjectivity.
Introduction
Eleanor Antin (née Fineman; February 27, 1935) is an American performance artist, film-maker, installation artist, conceptual artist, feminist artist, and university professor.
Wikidata identifier
Q1325708
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 22, 2025.
Introduction
Considered a key figure in conceptual, feminist, and performance art practice. She attended Music and Art High School in the Bronx, New School for Social Research, and City College of New York, where she met the poet David Antin, whom she married in 1961. She began as a painter and asssemblage artist, but soon turned to conceptual works, often involving photography and performance. Her work has been exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Kunsthalle Wien, and documenta 12, and is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, actor, author, conceptual artist, performance artist, photographer, sculptor, video artist
ULAN identifier
500061710
Names
Eleanor Antin, Yevgeny Antinov, Eleanora Antinova, Eleanor Fineman
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 22, 2025.
