Dara Birnbaum, a pioneer of the feminist and video art movements who probed, mimicked, and remixed mass media, died, May 2, at age 78.
Her groundbreaking practice has had a profound influence on contemporary art and visual culture. Over the past five decades, Birnbaum’s work critically examined the ideological and aesthetic constructs of mass media, challenging historical memory, public address, and the transmutability of images.
Her seminal works, including Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–1979), Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (1979), Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992), Arabesque(2011) and Journey: Shadow of the American Dream (2022) are widely recognized as foundational to the history of media art and have been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan (2023); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2023; also 2008), Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2022); Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh (2022), MoMA PS1, New York (2019); National Portrait Gallery, London (2018); Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio (2018), among many others.
Major retrospectives and surveys of her work have been presented at Belvedere Palace, Vienna (2024); Prada Aoyama, Tokyo (2023); Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan (2023); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2022); Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh (2022); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2010) and S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium (2009). Her work was exhibited in Documenta 7, 8, and 9.
The New York Times wrote of her work at the Hessel Museum of Art in 2022:
“Visitors could see how groundbreaking her video art has been, particularly her appropriation and editing of footage from TV, film, and the internet to raise questions about gender and politics; her most famous work, from the 1970s, isolates and repeats clips of the actress Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman to create a wry critique.”
Birnbaum’s practice continues to resonate, particularly in a media-saturated world, and her legacy remains an inspiration and influence for new generations of artists, scholars, and cultural thinkers worldwide.
Main Image: Portrait of Dara Birnbaum at Fondazione Prada. Photo: Francesca D’Amico
Anna Melnykova, "Palace of Labor (palats praci), architector I. Pretro, 1916", shot with analog Canon camera, 35 mm Fuji film in March 2022.
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