Ann Hamilton (born June 22, 1956, Lima, Ohio, U.S.) is an American installation artist who created performance art, physical objects, video and audio works, photographic prints, public art projects, site-specific sense-intensive installations, and other types of art. Working across multiple platforms to engage the viewer on several levels, she preferred to be known as a “maker” rather than an artist.
Hamilton grew up in a close-knit Midwestern family and dated her interest in textiles to the knitting and needlepoint she did in her childhood while sitting next to her grandmother on the sofa. That early influence led her to earn a B.F.A. in textile design (1979) from the University of Kansas. In 1985 she took an M.F.A. in sculpture from the Yale University School of Art, and that same year she joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she taught until 1991. Hamilton moved back to Ohio in 1992, and one year later she received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1999. In 2001 she became a professor of art at Ohio State University.
Hamilton’s concerns were myriad. She examined the notion of thread as a line similar to the marks that form letters and words, and she also made a similar connection to the sense of sound. She usually preferred not only to immerse the observer in a totally made environment but also to transform viewers into participants. One of Hamilton’s multimedia projects was the event of a thread (2012–13), commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The centrepiece of that work was an enormous silk curtain that spread across the width of the armory. The curtain billowed and swayed in a random motion that was determined by participant-observers on about 40 swings on long ropes that were connected to the ropes that held up the curtain. The work also featured caped performers (some of whom were accompanied by live pigeons in cages) sitting at tables and reading into microphones from a variety of literary texts. Their words could be heard over 42 radios in bags that participants could carry with them through the installation. At the other end of the space, opposite the speaking performers, a lone person sat writing with a pencil. Music and lighting effects completed the work.
Hamilton’s best works resisted analysis but were much admired. She had major commissions throughout the world, including CHORUS (2018), a text-based marble installation in the WTC Cortlandt subway station, New York City, which replaced the station destroyed in the September 11th attacks. Many of her projects were recorded in books (often carrying her name at the head of the title), among them Tropos (1993), The Picture Is Still (2003), An Inventory of Objects (2006), and Stylus (2012). Hamilton was honoured in 2015 with a National Medal of Arts. She was also the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, and the Guggenheim Memorial fellowship.