Rita Myers

Biography

Since 1975, Rita Myers has created a body of large-scale, multi-media installations that create highly theatrical, metaphorical spaces from a fusion of video, text, sound, and sculptural and natural forms. Juxtaposing elements of landscape and architecture, these formalized, symbolic environments function as contemplative sites that resonate with evocations of the ritualistic and the mystical.

Drawing on sources that range from physics and Jungian psychology to magic and alchemy, Myers' often site-specific works invoke the mythological and the spiritual, the unconscious worlds between the real and the imaginary. Integrating archetypal objects with iconic imagery, she uses video as a time-based pictorial element. Myers states that through her works she seeks to discover "the ways in which ancient archetypes survive as the foundation for current images of reality."

Myers was born in 1947. She received a B.A. from Douglass College, Rutgers University, and an M.A. from Hunter College. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Artists' Public Services (CAPS), the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation.

She has taught at numerous institutions, including Douglass College; Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and the University of Hartford. She is currently Adjunct Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City.

Myers has exhibited her work at numerous institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Kitchen, New York; the Alternative Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; San Francisco Museum of Art, California; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Berlin Film Festival; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; and Videobrasil International Festival, Sao Paulo. Her work Resurrection Body will be included in the 20th anniversary retrospective exhibition of the World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam in 2003. She lives in New York.

Artist's website: https://www.ritamyers.com/