2020 2-channel video 3.2K video, color, sound 38:47 minutes Dimensions variable Ricerche is a 5 part video series that steps off Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1963 film, Comizi d’Amore, to stage a contemporary inquiry into the “sexual problem” in the United States. While the political climate in post-war Italy in 1963 was deeply distinct from […]
2020 Glicée print 11 x 8.5 in In 1968, Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress, representing New York’s 12th congressional district in the House. She ran for president of the United States in 1972. I’m invested in her candidacy for the extraordinary and lasting material change it inspired. I am also invested […]
2019 2-channel video HD, color, sound 28 minutes Dimensions variable Ricerche is a 5 part video series that steps off Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1963 film, Comizi d’Amore, to stage a contemporary inquiry into the “sexual problem” in the United States. While the political climate in post-war Italy in 1963 was deeply distinct from that […]
2019 Collaborating Master Print: Peter Haarz Five-color plate lithographs on Somerset Satin White paper 17 x 20 in (each) Published by the Brodsky Center at PAFA, Philadelphia. The Nature of the Beast is a series of five lithographs based on five video frames extracted from a sixteen-minute-long video, Fingernails on a Blackboard: Bella. This series […]
Sharon Hayes & Brooke O’Harra 2011 & 2019 Performance 8hrs Time Passes is an ongoing collaboration between Brooke O’Harra and Sharon Hayes that takes the audio book of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as its spine. The audio book and showing are composed of three parts: Part I, The Window 00:00:00 to 04:43:37 Part II, Time Passes 35 […]
2017 Cast concrete, steel, and acrylic lettering 9.5 x 10.3 x 8.7 ft If They Should Ask is a temporary monument first exhibited in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia in 2017 in the exhibition Monument Lab, curated by Paul Farber and Ken Lum. The sculpture addresses the absence of monuments to women in the city of […]
2016 5-channel video HD, color, sound 36:40 minutes Dimensions variable In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You is a five-channel video work which engages material from lesbian, feminist and proto trans and queer newsletters and small-run magazines in the US and the UK from 1955-1977. In the work, 13 readers are staged in […]
2016 Digital print 30 x 20 in This limited edition print was produced for Studio Voltaire on the occasion of the exhibition of the video installation, In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You. The poster is a tight crop of an image taken from the London Gay Liberation Front’s 1971 manifesto. The photograph is intentionally […]
2014 acrylic on panel Ten panels two panels: 74 x 48 in each eight panels: 74 x 36 in each ’77 takes the National Women’s Conference, Houston, TX, 1977, as a point of departure. The National Women’s Conference was organized and authorized by an executive order from then-President Jimmy Carter in response to a 1975 UN […]
2014 analog video transferred to digital Single-channel video color, silent 16 minutes Dimensions variable Fingernails on a Blackboard: Bella investigates the voice as the embodied medium of speech. The video deploys the transcript of a session between politician Bella Abzug – the feminist and New York Congresswoman – and a vocal coach. The transcript was […]
2014 4-channel video HD, color, sound Plywood screening structure and bench Dimensions variable We cannot leave this world to others centers around the figure of the student as a vehicle for cultural transformation. Straddling a line between so-called childhood and adulthood, students have been pivotal to various political movements across a diverse set of histories and geographic and […]
2014 Acrylic on muslin 59¼×18¾ in
2014 Sharon Hayes, Liz Ligon and Friends of the High Line 14 Black and white photographs Women of the World Unite, they said. was part of a curated set of projects called Pier 54, initiated by Cecilia Alemani, director and curator of art for the High Line in New York City. Pier 54 speaks back to the […]
2013 Archival inkjet print 24 1/2 x 17 3/4 in
2013 Single-channel video HD, color sound 38 minutes Dimensions variable Ricerche: three uses Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1963 film, Comizi d’Amore as the guidepost for a contemporary inquiry into the “sexual problem” in the United States. While the political climate in post-war Italy in 1963 was deeply distinct from that of the United States in this contemporary moment, both […]
2012 Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett and the Women’s Liberation Cinema 16mm film, color, sound 33 minutes Dimensions variable In November 2007, I ran into Stephen Kent Jusick, Executive Director of MIX NYC, the experimental queer film festival in New York City, on the street in the East Village. “I was justing thinking about you,” he […]
2012 Single-channel video SD, black-and-white, silent 4min Dimensions variable This video loop cycles through textual descriptions of female voices taken from newspapers dating from the nineteenth century to the present. Ranging from ostensibly objective accounts to critical judgments, these citations reveal ways in which voices are evaluated and, as a result, what borders are imposed around the individual. […]
2012 Overhead projection Dimensions variable In 1977, Oklahoma beauty queen and singer Anita Bryant was as recognized for her outspoken hatred of homosexuality as for the ballads that had made her famous as a singer. Bryant, spokesperson for the political coalition Save Our Children, successfully crusaded to overturn a Dade County, Florida, ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis […]
2012 Various authors organized by Sharon Hayes with Angela Beallor Photocopies Dimensions variable Flyers lent by: Marc Beallor; Nastalie Bogira; Louis Cisneroz; June Diebold; Kristin Dooley; Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka; Mike Flugennock, School of the Americas Watch; Imani Henry; Kate Huh; Nik Krempasky; Brooke O’Harra; Sam Tylicki; Beth Vild; Visual Aids; Occupy the Hood, Detroit; Gay, Lesbian, […]
2012 Acrylic on muslin
2012 Cotton fabric sewn on cotton muslin 8 x 102 ft Now a chasm has opened between us that holds us together and keeps us apart evokes political theorist Hannah Arendt’s description of the experience of living in the world, which she likened to sitting at a table that both separates and unites us. The title and […]
2012 5 Letterpress prints 20×14.5 in (each) May 1st extends my interest in the intersections between private and public, personal and political, life. These five letterpress prints together compose an address to an unnamed lover – about and around the potent pleasure and despair of political desire.
2012 5 Letterpress prints 14 1/2 x 19 3/4 in (each) 30 de Mayo extends my interest in the intersections between private and public, personal and political, life. These five letterpress prints together compose an address to an unnamed lover – about and around the potent pleasure and despair of political desire. This Spanish version […]
2012 in collaboration with Sarah H. Gordon 2 double-LP record sets, silkscreened cover and two turntables 75min Sarah H. Gordon’s Strike Journal, May 1970 is a double LP record set on which Sarah H. Gordon reads from a journal that she wrote over 40 years ago documenting her experience as a participant in the student strike at […]
2011 Vintage record covers An Ear to the Sounds of Our History, is a series of works made from LP record covers drawn from an extensive archive of spoken-word vinyl records. The collection dates from 1948 to 1984, tracing a period when political speech was often recorded on and disseminated through vinyl records. Using the album covers to […]
2010 4-channel video HD, color, sound 36 minutes plywood, projection, monitors Dimensions variable Parole is a four-channel video installation composed of semi-autonomous video “scenes” that accumulate to form a narrative without a story. Focused on a central character who records sound but never speaks, Parole teases out multiple relationships between politics and desire, intimacy and estrangement, speaking and […]
2009 2 digital c-prints
2009 Performance and single-channel video HD, Color, sound 10 minutes I Didn’t Know I Loved You is a site-specific collaborative performance and installation made for the 2009 Istanbul biennial, What Keeps Mankind Alive?, curated by the Crotian collective WhW. The work is one of a series of performances that I staged with Becca Blackwell, parts of which […]
2009 35mm slide installation 13 projections Dimensions variable In the Near Future is a performance-based artwork in which I stage anachronistic and speculative protest actions in an ongoing investigation into the figure of the protester, the speech act of the protest sign and the contemporary political construction of public space and public speech. In the Near Future exists […]
Yard (Sign), 2009 Found and fabricated yard signs Dimensions variable Yard (Sign) was originally made as a “cover” of the 1961 Allan Kaprow piece, Yard, for the 2009 exhibition, Allan Kaprow YARD, curated by Helen Molesworth, which also included works by Josiah McElheny and PopeL. A riff off Kaprow’s title, Yard (Sign), was also influenced by various […]
2008 Silkscreen
2008 Multi-channel video and audio installation 10 PA speakers, 5 projection screens (helium balloons, colored light bulbs) HD, color, sound Dimensions variable Revolutionary Love: I am Your Worst Fear, I am Your Best Fantasy is the final in a series of love addresses. Moving deeper off the work I started in Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t […]
2008 Performance with five texts printed on colored paper 8.7 x 11 in Unannounced, was a performance staged for Frieze Projects at the Frieze Art Fair in October 2008. Each day at a predetermined time, pastel-coloured leaflets were distributed bearing texts that read variously as private letters, political commentary, or personal appeal. Written in 2008, in the early […]
9 Scripts from a Nation at War 2007 Collaboration with David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, and Andrea Geyer 10-channel video installation HD, color, sound 5 hours 22 minutes 9 Scripts from a Nation at War is a 10-channel video installation that responds to conditions and questions that have arose in the aftermath of the U.S. […]
Performance Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954–003064: A Public Reading, is a four-hour public reading of unedited transcripts from 18 Combatant Status Review Tribunals held at the U.S. military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between July 2004 and March 2005. A part of the larger collaborative work, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, […]
2007/8 Sound installation with framed digital print and PA speaker Dimensions variable 23 5/8×20 1/8 in (print) For eight days between December 1, 2007 and January 12, 2008, I walked from The New Museum at Bowery and Prince Sts in lower Manhattan to a different site of public address such as Union Square, Tompkins Square, Confucius Square […]
2007 Sound installation, spray paint on paper 5 PA speakers, 5 playback devices, 5 framed works on paper Dimensions variable 20 x 24 in (each print) In Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love?, five PA speakers stand in a line, like a line of speaking bodies, projecting the five addresses that […]
2005 Single-channel video SD video, color, sound 44 minutes Dimensions variable After Before is a quasi-fictional, quasi-documentary video project in which two central figures investigate the pronouncement and production of “public opinion” by interviewing people on the streets of New York City throughout the month of September 2004, just two months before the 2004 US Presidential Elections. In […]
2005 Collaboration with Andrea Geyer 5-page poster project Print dimensions 11×17 Dimensions variable A five-page poster project that places line drawings of protest photographs in relation to groups of questions from varying positional and instrumental investments (sociology, market research, psychotherapy, etc.). The work examines the way in which language traces boundaries around individual and collective activities and subject […]
2004/2008 Performance and video installation SD, color, sound 10 hours Dimensions variable In the performance My Fellow Americans: 1981-1988, I read all 34 of Ronald Reagan’s official “Address to the Nation” speeches, beginning with the “Address to the Nation on the Economy”, February 5, 1981 and ending with his “Farewell Address to the Nation”, January 11, 1989. These […]
2003 Single-channel video SD video, color, sound 10 minutes Dimensions variable In 10 Minutes of Collective Activity, an audience of 22 people are videotaped watching archival footage of a 10-minute speech by Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff from the 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago, IL. The speech, was the principal nomination for Senator George McGovern, a vocal […]
2003 4 Archival C-prints 21 x 15in (each) Interview Portraits is a series of four photographs that I took while on a residency in Banff, Alberta. Randomly stopping pairs of people on the Main Street in town, these portraits stand oddly and uncomfortably between two familiar scenes: the tourist portrait and the documentary still.
October 2, 2003
2003 4-channel video SD, color, sound Tape duration between 9:50 min and 20 min Dimensions variable On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California by a radical political organization called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). From February to April, 1974, the SLA and Patty Hearst made four audio tapes in which […]
2001 4-channel video; eighty-one 35mm color slides and table SD, color, Sound 60 minutes Dimensions variable At many historic sites in the United States, tour guides are officially called “historical interpreters.” Their quasi-educational role is to translate the site for the visitor. Each tour guide creates their own tour based on an accepted body of knowledge, individual […]
2000-02 Collaboration with Andrea Geyer Multi-channel video SD, color, sound Durations variable Dimensions variable The collaborative project, Cambio de Lugar_Change of Place_Ortswechsel, initiates a set of dialogues with people who identify as, have identified as, or are/have been identified (from an external perspective) as a woman and who live in different contexts of language. The resulting conversations […]
1997 Theatrically-based performance Props, 32’ long painted backdrop, sound, flyers Dimensions variable 75 minutes The Lesbian is a performance based on a three-and-a-half month research project in which I drove across the United States interviewing lesbians, documenting evidence of lesbian communities/populations and performing in lesbian living rooms. In the performance, I assume the roles of The Researcher, The […]
1997 The Lesbian Love Tour was a three-and-a-half month pseudo-anthropological research project in which I drove across the United States to discover “lesbians in their natural habitat.” At that time in the late 90s, I was making theatrically-based solo performance work. While I more often referred to myself as a dyke than I did a […]