ABOUT THE ARTIST
Quintan Ana Wikswo is an artist working at the intersections of text, visual art, and video installations. Her work appears in museums, galleries, performances spaces and publications and performance spaces throughout Europe, Asia and the United States. Through ongoing collaborations with composers, painters and choreographers, her lyric texts and visual work often find voice in collaborative and hybrid forms of dance, performance, and site-specific installation. Much of her site-specific work explores personal histories within crimes against humanity and genocide.
Wikswo’s first solo museum show will open in July 2011 at the Smithsonian-affiliated Center for Jewish History and the Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan. Her work has exhibited at the Musée des Moulages in Lyon (France), Schloss Plüschow (Germany), the Kebbel Villa (Germany), National Sun Yat-sen Museum (Taiwan), the Democracy Center at Cambridge (UK), and in the United States at Boston Court Performing Arts Center, LiveWire Festival at the University of Baltimore, and at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Newman Concert Hall at the University of Southern California, the Gallery of the Art Center College for Design, People Inside Electronics, Phyllis Stein Art, Deborah Martin Gallery, and the Downtown Art Center Gallery in Los Angeles.
A regular contributor to Conjunctions and Denver Quarterly, Wikswo’s fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Tin House, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, New American Writing, Trickhouse, DIAGRAM and many others. She writes a regular column about text-based visual art for Drunken Boat and Catalysis Projects.
Wikswo’s book Schwarzer Tod and the Useless Eaters (Catalysis Projects) has been commissioned for performance by GroupMotion Dance Company with choreography by Manfred Fischbeck and original score for instrument and libretto for voices by internationally acclaimed composer Andrea Clearfield.
Her projects are supported by grants, fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Sydney, Oberpfälzer Kunstlerhäus (Germany), the Ucross Foundation, Ragdale, the Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Caldera Center, and the Haut de Fee Centre in Serecourt (France). She is ongoing artist-in-residence at the Lynchburg Old City Cemetery in Virginia, one of the oldest African-American cemeteries in the U.S. where she makes site specific work in the prostitutes’ and midwives’ sections of the cemetery.
She earned an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree in History and Critical Theory from the University of Texas at Austin with focus on Gender and African-American Studies. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction and Poetry from San Francisco State University, where she graduated with the President’s Award and the University Distinguished Service Award.
She has taught at the graduate and undergraduate level, and maintains a lively reading and artist lecture tour through Europe and North America.
Her studio is located in Los Angeles.
