Bennington College, University of Illinois at Chicago
Hendl Helen Mirra[1] is an American
conceptual artist. "[Like Henry David Thoreau, she is a] maximalist in a minimalist robe", with an idiosyncratic practice.[2] She is engaged with ideas common to buddhist[3][4][5] and
pragmatist[6][7] philosophies, and since 2008 her art practice has been integrated with walking.[8] She has said of walking: "It is an unskilled activity, and a modest activity, and a free activity, and an always-available activity, and an equipment-free activity, and an active activity."[9] In an essay on Mirra's work, Yukio Lippit described her engagement thus: "Mirra’s practice champions walking as a specific form of thinking that bypasses language. Indeed, one senses that she shares with Zen Buddhists in particular a deep skepticism towards language as an authentic mechanism of discovery."[10] At the same time, she has often worked with language as a primary material.[11][12]
Career
Hendl Mirra has worked in diverse media including weaving,[13] writing - particularly indexes,[14][15][16] experimental music,[17][18] sculpture, 16mm film, and video.[19] "Environmental belonging" has been a persistent theme,[20] while keeping within a restricted palette.[21] Her first one-person institutional exhibition, Sky-wreck, at the
Renaissance Society at the
University of Chicago in 2001, was a indigo-dyed textile sculpture of a section of the sky, imagined as part of a geodesic structure.[22][23] In addition to
John Cage,[24] Stanley Brouwn,
André Cadere, and
Douglas Huebler are key influences.[9]
She has an exhibition history in North and South America, Europe, and Japan,[25][26] and participated in broad international exhibitions such as the 11th Havana Bienal, the 30th
São Paulo Art Biennial and the 50th
Venice Biennial. A fifteen-year (1995-2009) survey of her work, Edge Habitat, was presented in 2014 at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal, and the corresponding publication Edge Habitat Materials was published by Whitewalls.[27]
She was a Senior Lecturer in Visual Art and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago (2001-2005)[28] and a Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities in the department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University until 2013.[29] She has been an artist-in-residence at
University of California at Berkeley,[30] and a guest of the
DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.[31] She lives in Northern California.[32]