Terry Fox

Biography

Terry Fox was a central participant in the West Coast performance art, video and Conceptual Art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Working in the San Francisco Bay Area, his political, site-specific performance actions explored ritual and symbolic content in the objects, places, and natural phenomena of everyday life.

Fox's work in video was an extension of these concerns. His 1974 Children's Tapes is a classic early investigation of the medium. With wit and ingenuity, Fox used the intimate scale and time-based properties of video to translate the aesthetic and formal tenets of minimalism, real time, perception and performance into the realm of the everyday. These engaging phenomenological dramas, which illustrate basic principles of physical science with household objects, unfold as anecdotal narratives of the quotidian.

Living and working in Europe for many years, Fox continued to produce multi-media installations, performances and sculptures.

Terry Fox was born in 1943 and died in 2008. He studied at the Cornish School of Allied Arts in Seattle and the Accademia di Belli Arti in Rome. His performances and works were presented throughout the United States and Europe, at festivals and institutions including the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Documentas 5 and 6, Kassel, Germany; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; De Appel, Amsterdam; Modern Art Gallery, Vienna; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum Folkwang, Essen, West Germany; Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris; Het Apollohuis, Eindhoven, Holland; and Gallerie L'A, Liege, Belgium.

Fox lived in Liege, Belgium until his death in 2008.