Born in Los Angeles and based in New York, Shimon Attie is a visual artist whose work explores how contemporary media may be used to reimagine new relationships between space, time, place, and identity, and to animate urban space with imagery of its lost histories, marginalized communities, and speculative futures. His practice extends across video, photography, and immersive multimedia projects in museums and galleries, and site-specific installations for public spaces.
Attie uses contemporary media to reanimate architectural and public sites with images of their lost histories, and to show how histories of marginalized and forgotten communities may be visually introduced into the physical landscape of the present. These works range from slide projections in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, to underwater light boxes in Copenhagen’s Borsgraven Canal, to sophisticated laser projections illuminating the immigrant experience on tenement buildings on New York’s Lower East Side, and a video of recent asylum seekers to New York, shown on a barge circling the city’s waterways.
Attie has described these works, in part, as “a kind of peeling back of the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath.”
Attie has also created a number of community-based immersive video installations. In these works, he engages local communities, often those that have been marginalized or traumatized, to find new ways of representing their history and memory, their present, and their potential futures. This includes a commission by the BBC and the Arts Council of Wales, The Attraction of Onlookers, to mark the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Aberfan coal-mining and school disaster; Racing Clocks Run Slow: Archaeology of a Racetrack, inspired by the former Bridgehampton Auto Racetrack in Bridgehampton, Long Island; Sightings: The Ecology of an Art Museum, a commission for San Francisco’s de Young Museum; MetroPAL.IS, an installation for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum involving members of the Israeli and Palestinian communities in New York, which traveled to the Wexner Center for the Arts; Lost in Space (After Huck), a commission for the Saint Louis Art Museum; and The Crossing, an art film that Attie made with Syrian refugees recently arrived in Europe.
The artist’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Museum, New York; National Gallery of Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Saint Louis Art Museum; Wexner Center for the Arts; National Museum of Wales; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, as well as grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Stiftung Kunstfonds in Germany. Attie holds the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2018 was inducted into the National Academy of Design. His work has been the subject of five prior monographs, as well as films that have aired on PBS, BBC, and ARD in Germany. He received his M.F.A. from San Francisco State University in 1991. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.
As the Theodore U. Horger ’61 Artist in Residence for the Visual and Performing Arts at Lehigh University, Attie worked on the sculptural and video installation Starstruck: An American Tale. The project was exhibited at the Lehigh University Art Galleries, September 6–December 3, 2022, and is accompanied by a monograph of the same title, published in association with Black Dog Press in London.