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Janet Zweig

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Lipstick enigma by janet zweig


Janet Zweig is an American artist whose work consists primarily of art in the public realm and computer-driven language-generating sculpture.

Contents

Professor obsessive and his two compulsions by janet zweig


Life and career

Janet Zweig was born in Milwaukee, WI, raised in Chicago, IL, and has lived in New York since 1994. Zweig received her BA from Cornell University and her MFA from The Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY.

In the 1980s she produced several editioned artist's books. In the late 1980s, she started to make computer-driven sculpture using printers and language-generating programs. After 1997, she began to work exclusively in the public realm.

She is currently a senior critic at the Rhode Island School of Design and a lecturer at Brown University's Graduate Program in Public Humanities.

Zweig has received several fellowships and awards including the Rome Prize Fellowship in 1992, and residencies at PS1 Museum and the MacDowell Colony. She has received the Public Art Network Year in Review award for eleven of her public commissions, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Computer Arts in 1999, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Sculpture in 1994.

Zweig has works in various public and private collections.

Public commissions

Some of her public commissions include the following works:

Columbus Never..., Columbus, OH, 2012-3. This was a temporary piece for the bicentennial of Columbus on a 66' wall across the street from the state house. The first five words of this generative sentence were written by the artist and installed in three parts every two weeks. Afterwards, a writing contest solicited three to five word entries from the residents of Columbus to continue the sentence. The winning entries were installed every two weeks during the bicentennial year of the city.

Lipstick Enigma, Orlando, FL, 2010. Made of 1200 resin lipsticks, and 1200 stepper motors, this computer-driven sentence-generator, using rules and lexicon written by the artist, invents and writes a new line of text, and displays it on the sign when triggered by a motion detector. The sentences mix the language of engineering with the language of beauty advertising. The piece was commissioned by The State of Florida Art in State Buildings Program for an engineering school at The University of Central Florida.

Prairie Logic, Kansas City, MO, 2012. Zweig created a full-scale boxcar and planted a prairie on a public rooftop in downtown Kansas City in collaboration with local architects, El Dorado. The boxcar doorway, when opened, becomes a proscenium stage for performances. Through local curation, events are programmed for the space.

Carrying On, New York, NY, 2004. Zweig collaborated with Edward Del Rosario on a steel, slate, and marble frieze installed in the Prince Street subway station in New York. This piece is part of the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority’s collection.

7:11AM 11.20.1979 79°55'W 40°27'N , Pittsburgh, PA, 2009. Zweig was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy to create a memorial for a local woman. The piece consists of fiber-optic lights embedded in the lawn of Mellon Park, reflecting the night sky on the night of the young woman's birth. The lights are surrounded by granite disks which are inscribed with the name of each star and facts about them.

Pedestrian Drama, Milwaukee, WI, 2011. Zweig installed a public work commissioned by the City of Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. After an open call to community members, Zweig filmed dramatic tableaus and created flip-book style animations by using train flip-disk signs and electronics placed in kiosks on five existent city light poles, triggered by motion detectors.

North of the North Pole, Queens, NY, 2013. Zweig created the piece for Glen Oaks Library in Queens. This Percent for Art project consists of circuit boards with LED's on both sides that scroll unanswerable questions collected from philosophers from around the world.

References

Janet Zweig Wikipedia