2009 VERMONT STUDIO CENTER Residency, Johnson, Vermont
2007 SKOWHEGAN SCHOOL OF PAINTING AND SCULPTURE Residency, Skowhegan,
Maine
1989-1991 CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS Fine Art, Art History,
Semiotics, Feminism, Popular Culture, Conceptual and Critical Theory,
Valencia, California
1988-1989 SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS Photography, Painting, Sculpture,
Media Communication, New York, New York
1982-1986 ARTS MAGNET HIGH SCHOOL Painting, Drawing, Art History,
Printmaking Dallas, Texas
In Denise Prince’s photographic series Beyond This Thing Between Us elements of a narrative are assembled and the intimate space created for the photography to take place becomes the subjective content. It is not important that the scenes are constructed but that the construction results in creating intimacy.
For her photographic series Things I Never Told You, Prince constructs narratives that utilize the language of advertisement and fashion photography then carefully disrupts the subtext. Her dislocated and buoyant portraits, reflect lives informed by American culture and nuanced by individuality.
Prince’s short films and videos center around the artist’s willingness to speak from her subjectivity despite the fact that doing so exposes information that is culturally shameful. Prince uses dance and other devices in her work to provide a framework for the normative and non-normative behavior she embodies.
Her work has shown in art galleries and festivals in the United States, Mexico, Spain, Italy and Turkey. Jerry Saltz (New York magazine) said "Your video is excellent; very raw, mysterious, revealing, complex, and vulnerable, radically vulnerable. You are telling your secrets while keeping them secret..."
Wonder Women, Mary Anne Connolly, bRILLIANT, August 2004
Encountering the photographs of Denise Prince is like launching into a novel on a random page. You can only fill in so much. There’s no certainty of what’s happened up to this point in the story. Her haunting portraits, a disparate family of anonymous, real women of every age and body type, clothed in chiffon to charmeuse, face us with honestly and eloquence despite their silent gaze. Staged with props as common as purses and bouquets or as bizarre as half-open gourdes and a stuffed Tweety bird, the subjects compliment their settings, even though they look like they’ve never been there before. One woman stands in an open desert, another a grocery store aisle. Here, a forest, there, a dumpsite. Stories started mid-stream leave you to fill in the blanks.
Things I Never Told You: The Photographs of Denise Prince, Risa Puleo, Women and Their Work catalogue, May 2007
...Applying rhetoric from literary theory and Roland Barthe’s essay “Rhetoric of the Image” to define how narrative functions in contemporary photography, Lucy Soutter writes, “Photography is always and yet never a narrative form: always in that it contains the permanent record of the act of photographing and of any actions that were in progress at the moment of exposure, never in that it remains forever static... Caught in a state of permanent suspense vis a vis events that have just happened or are about to take place, photographs contain essential seeds of narratives that can never come to fruition except in the imagination.” Soutter’s discussion provides useful terms for deciphering the codes in Prince’s images. By separating the act of photographing from the actions being performed in the photograph - narration from narrative - we can begin to understand the rhetoric of Prince’s images and the strategic way in which she “frames” her tales.
...Though Prince references imagery from a history of representations of woman in art sine the Renaissance, Cindy Sherman is the artist to whom Prince is most indebted to conceptually. Where thirty years ago, Cindy Sherman used the visual codes of cinema to imply narrative in photography and explore the way in which women are framed in film in her Untitled (Film Stills), Prince employs the visual syntax of editorial fashion and style photography. Seducing through slickness, saturated color, professional styling and art direction, Prince’s photographs appeal to commercial sensibilities. But she then disrupts with details, the very ones that fashion photographers airbrush out to create their images of desire, and individual elements fail to coalesce. Rather than creating and marketing desire, images in the series complicate, even usurp, desire by amplifying the contrivance of fashion photography to the level of the absurd.
Jerry Saltz, New York magazine
April 2009
“Your video is excellent; very raw, mysterious, revealing, complex, and vulnerable, radically vulnerable. You are telling your secrets while keeping them secret. I did think of the early Pipilotti Rist tape, “I’m Not a Girl Who Misses Much” and maybe Gillian Wearing’s “Dancing in Peckem.” But the work is still very strong. Keep me posted.
Way to go.”
Jerry
Artist Alison O’Daniel (Intimate Address/Adulterer)
July 2009
I think this video is perfect. As art and as life. It describes what I want out of feminism and art. It's so wholly unwilling to accept anything but honesty and truth without concealing it behind power plays, desire, and flirtation-as so much feminist work has done in the last 30 years. Mine included-indeed this is the very thing I've wrestled with.
And having been there with you during that summer, watching, it started out as slightly awkward knowing what you were talking about-as if I had a perspective that isn't addressed in the piece. But then it unfolds and isn't awkward that I know what I know or saw what I saw...instead it's a relief because it speaks what we never speak. And ultimately, I think this is what we are all aiming for. At least this is my philosophy- to aim for a disclosure and an honesty that is not in contradiction with empowerment...and most importantly simultaneously owns itself within vulnerability. Usually, work about vulnerability- much of mine has done this, and much of your other work does this - still relies on harnessing sexual desire I think, in a dishonest way, that often cancels the aim out and becomes an imploding wannabe feminist mess. This mess is what so many people respond to and want and are titillated by...and yet I can't shake the feeling that it hands the power right back to the audience because they can name it and understand it. And sometimes, often if we really take the time to think about it, this is interesting because it points to the failure of us. But I think, in this piece, it works in an opposite direction...you display the point of vulnerability not as a sexual prowess, but from a space of defeat and in saying what hasn't been and usually isn't said, you find power.
Matt Seitz, former film critic for New York Press, for the House Next Door
May 2009
“Prince makes unsettling, haunting, very personal short films that deliberately confound viewer reactions; they're confessional, sometimes squirm-inducingly so, but with a teasing, opaque edge that's playful and accessible. I guess you could call them ‘experimental,’ but I prefer not to, since the word seems too cold to describe such warm work.”
Artist Andrea Bowers (Letter to Wes Anderson)
May 2009
“Denise. I like this video. It's so strange with all that pink and the visor! The visor is amazing and somehow throws the thing all out of whack in a brilliant way. I like the more minimal dialog. I think it is interesting directing. It is video that has a totally female sensibility to quote a lynda benglis video. This video will make guys squirm. That’s why I love it. It's great!”
Edward Rubin, Art Critic, New York, NY
(Celebrity Topiary by Denise Prince for Art City Austin fair)
on Downtown television program, Art City Austin on KLRU, November 13, 2008
“I am a writer. I travel a lot internationally to write about big shows and biennales. The thing I enjoyed most, as afar as the work of art, is the topiary. I think it’s the most original thing in the show.”
Artist Jenny Levonian (Intimate Distance – Adulterer)
November 2009
“I watched your new videos--very intriguing and brave work. So raw. I couldn't turn my eyes away which is the opposite reaction I have to most video. The background scenery was beautiful--all that beige grass reminded me of a Wyeth painting.”
2009
DOWNTOWN Municipal Shadow, Performance, Marfa, Texas
EFFEARTE GALLERY Photography, Video and Performance for Beyond This
Thing Between Us, Milan, Italy
ABANDONED LOT Intimate Distance, Adulterer, Performance, Marfa, Texas
2007
WOMEN AND THEIR WORK Photographs from Things I Never Told You and Girl
in a Bubble, Performance, Austin, Texas
2004
PLAN B Photographs from Women, Austin, Texas
2003
ART BAR Photographs from Women, Dallas, Texas
1999
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVE The Deep End, Feature Film Screening; Co-wrote,
co-produced and played the lead role, produced by Cary Woods, New York,
New York
RALIEGH STUDIOS The Deep End, Feature Film Screening, Los Angeles,
California
1991
PIK ME UP Good for Amusement Only, Public Art Installation, Produced and
programmed short films for a coin-operated film booth and installed it
in espresso cafe, Los Angeles, California
PURPLE PANTHER Good for Amusement Only, Public Art Installation, Film
booth installation in tattoo parlor, Los Angeles, California
PARKER ZANIC GALLERY Speaker Death, Performance, Los Angeles, California
THE OTHER 45 MINUTES Gold In Unison, Performance, Los Angeles,
California
1990
RAJI’S Speaker Death, Performance, Los Angeles, California
MAIN GALLERY Free Beer, Female Beet Wrestling, Performance, CalArts,
Valencia, California
MAIN GALLERY The Running (of the sheep), Performance, CalArts, Valencia,
California
2009
FESTIVAL DE CINE INTERNACIONAL DE BARCELONA Beck Video and Soldier video
screening, Barcelona, Spain
ROOFTOP FILMS Home Movies Short Films program, Beck Video screening,
Brooklyn, New York
Performance For C.Q. and Others for Low Lives, projected in real time at
FIVEMYLES, Brooklyn, New York; DIASPORA VIBE GALLERY, Miami, Florida;
LABOTANICA, Houston, Texas
SAN FRANCISCO SHORT FILM FESTIVAL, Soldier video screening, San
Francisco, California
INTERNATIONAL ARTEXPO - ESSENCE / BORDERS . Soldier and Beck Video
Screening, Istanbul, Turkey
2009
BIG RED SUN Beck Video Screening, Austin, Texas
2008
APAMA MACKEY GALLERY Photographs for Treat, Houston, Texas
WOMEN AND THEIR WORK Performance for Interact Out, Austin, Texas;
Thirtieth Anniversary Gala
ART ALLIANCE AUSTIN Celebrity Topiary public art commission for Art City
Austin, Austin, Texas, jurors Laurence Miller Fluent Collaborative, Eva
Buttacavoli Austin Museum of Art, Annette Carlozzi Blanton Museum of
Art , Ursula Davila Blanton Museum of Art
COLOR OF ENERGY GALLERY Photographs for You Are Here, Dayton, Ohio;
curated by Eva Buttacavoli, Director of Exhibitions and Education,
Austin Museum of Art
UNITED STATES ART AUTHORITY Photograph for Rewind Seventies, Austin,
Texas
2007
LAWNDALE ART CENTER Retablo for Dia de los Muertos, Houston, Texas
2006
ALBUQUERQUE MUSEUM OF ART & HISTORY Photograph for Biennial
Southwest, Albuquerque, NM; juror Neal Benezra, Director, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art
PHOTOGRAPHY NOW: ONE HUNDRED PORTFOLIOS Photographs from Things I Never
Told You on DVD-ROM organized by Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio
WICHITA FALLS MUSEUM OF ART
New American Talent: The Twentieth Exhibition, Wichita Falls, Texas,
Traveling exhibition
GALLERI URBANE Photographs for Me, Myself and Everybody Else, Marfa,
Texas
2005
ARTHOUSE AT THE JONES CENTER - NEW AMERICAN TALENT 20 New American
Talent: The Twentieth Exhibition, traveling exhibition originating in
Austin, Texas; juror Dan Cameron, Senior Curator at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York
2040 GALLERY Photograph for Endless Summer, Austin, Texas
JORDAN GALLERY Photographs for Smithville, Texas!, Smithville, Texas
2004
ARCAUTE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO Photographs for Los Americanos, Monterrey,
Mexico
ARTHOUSE AT THE JONES CENTER - NEW AMERICAN TALENT 19 New American
Talent, traveling exhibition, Austin, Texas; juror Jerry Saltz, Senior
Art Critic, The Village Voice, New York
AMVETS Photographs for Post 65, Marfa, Texas
2040 GALLERY Photograph for Cicada, Austin, Texas
2003
GUADALUPE ARTS CENTER Photographs for Eclectic Gatherin,g Austin, Texas
1991
BLISS The Significance of Bricolage, Installation at Bliss Gallery,
Pasadena, California
