Hers was not the most familiar name on the guest list (that would be Stephen King or Sally Field or even Meredith Monk). But when Ann Hamilton received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama at the White House on Thursday, no one who knows her work would have been surprised. In her four-decade career as an installation artist, she has often worked with textiles and the senses to powerfully and elegantly highlight cultural and social issues. In 1999, representing the United States at the Venice Biennale, she addressed oppression in America with walls of Braille that caught red powder as it slid from above, literally visualizing language. Six year earlier, she won a MacArthur Fellowship (genius grant), and has since completed 18 major installations, from using sound and voice to animate the history of a barn to filling a Swedish gallery with hand-cranked wind machines, filling a display of an altarpiece with a “performance of breath.”
From Ann Hamilton’s ONEEVERYONE series, photographed at Mia in January 2014: Greta. Horse, 7th-10th century, Ceramic, Gift of Leo A. and Doris Hodroff, collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
In January of 2014, Hamilton joined Krista Tippett, host of public radio’s “On Being,” at Mia for a conversation on the spiritual nature of her work. Tippett described her as having “a spark of the infinite in the way she spoke.” Hamilton was then an artist in residence at Mia. For several days at the end of January, she set up a camera and a translucent sheet in the vast studio of the museum’s Visual Resources department. She brought in Mia docents, staffers, guards, and others affiliated with the museum and photographed them, pressed against the sheet—with and without objects from the collection—such that only what directly touched the sheet was clearly visible.
The sensation of touch is usually more felt than seen, but when it comes to objects in a museum—which few are allowed to touch—the relationship is reversed: we must feel with our eyes. Hamilton’s photography inverted this dynamic. “For many it was a singular opportunity to touch something they had only previously held in the eye,” Hamilton wrote. To view Mia’s collection in this way, barely visible through a sheet, is to see the objects not for what they are but for what they mean to us.