Alexandra Grant


Alexandra Annette Grant is an American visual artist who examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. She uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for much of that work. Grant examines the process of writing and ideas based in linguistic theory as it connects to art and creates visual images inspired by text and collaborative group installations based on that process. She is based in Los Angeles.

Early life and education

Grant was born in Fairview Park, Ohio, to a Scottish geology professor and a political science
professor, American foreign-service diplomat, and educational administrator based in Africa and the Middle East. Her parents, who both spent time in Africa, divorced when she was young and she lived with her mother, who was based in Mexico City. In Mexico City, she attended a British school that was made up of a multi-national student body. When she was 11 years old, Grant attended a boarding school, the Thomas Jefferson School, in St. Louis, Missouri for a year. Shortly thereafter, she moved with her mother to Paris, where she attended the International School of Paris. From these experiences in various locations in Europe and the Middle East, Grant is multi-lingual, and speaks English, Spanish, and French.
In 1994, Grant graduated from Swarthmore College with a BA in history and studio art. In 2000, Grant graduated from San Francisco's California College of the Arts with an MFA in drawing and painting.

Career

In 2007, Grant had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, curated by Alma Ruiz. A catalog from the exhibition features Grant's large-scale works on paper, an essay on Grant's work by Ruiz, and an essay that inspired Grant by the French writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous.
Grant's work has been described as a "radical collaboration", that is, work made in collaboration with the text and work of other writers and artists, and is often participatory and ongoing. The longest exchange has been with the pioneering writer of hypertext fiction, Michael Joyce. The paintings and sculpture based on Joyce's texts have been the subject of at least three series: the "Ladder Quartet", the "Six Portals", and "Bodies".
In 2008 she participated in Edgar Arceneaux’s Watts House Project, a non profit group that aimed to renovate houses across the Watts Towers, in Los Angeles. Each of the households who agreed to participate in the project was appointed a team of an artist and an architect to remodel their homes. The initial plan for Grant’s “Love House” was to build a large construction of her brands’ logo over the house. However, years passed with no major constructions taking place to any of the houses and a dispute with the IRS and the Watts House project in general, has prevented it to come to fruition. Grant resigned from the projects’ board but is still raising funds in order to complete the “Love House”. No work has been completed as of yet.
In 2013, Grant collaborated on twin series of exhibitions with Cixous, based on the latter's book Philippines. The "Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest” exhibition first took place at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and at Mains d’Oeuvres in Saint-Ouen, France. Participants joined Grant in creating large-scale drawings of Cixous's novel, which touched on many themes including telepathy in Cixous and the work of Jacques Derrida and Sigmund Freud. Grant and Cixous spoke about their telepathic relationship in 2013 as part of a conversation from Mains d’Oeuvres to Nottingham Contemporary in 2016. 18th Street Arts Center published the “Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest” to thank the many participants in the project, a catalog which includes photographs of both exhibitions, and essays by Cixous, Grant, curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas, Robert Nashak, and a transcription of Grant's 2013 conversation with Cixous.
In 2013, Grant continued this work in the series called “Century of the Self". The first exhibition was “Drawn to Language" at USC's The Fisher Museum in 2013, followed by a show at Lora Reynold's Gallery in Austin, TX in 2014, at the 2015 Venice Biennial in an exhibition called “We Must Risk Delight: 20 Artists from Los Angeles” and in a two-person exhibition with Steve Roden at the Pasadena Museum of California Art that was called “These Carnations Defy Language.” These works were inspired by the documentary film Century of the Self by BBC documentarian Adam Curtis.
In 2015, Grant exhibited her work in a painting called “Antigone 3000” inspired by the Greek myth, and specifically a phrase in Sophocles's play where Antigone confronts her uncle Creon—the king—and says, “I was born to love not to hate.” Works from Antigone 3000 have been shown at the Barnsdall Art Center, when Grant won the City of Los Angeles Mid-Career Artist Award in 2015 and most recently in 2017 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the exhibition “L.A. Exuberance: Recent Gifts by Artists.”
In 2017, Grant wrote the text for "Antigone is me" with her sister, Florence Grant. The exhibit is a community-based project installation held at The Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles.
Grant has cited R.B. Kitaj as an influence.

Teaching

Grant has worked as a professor. From 2009 to 2011, she was an adjunct professor at Art Center College of Design. In 2010, Grant taught an MFA seminar at Cal State Northridge and from 2013 to 2014 was a mentor in the Pacific Northwest College of Art's Distance MFA program. In 2015, Grant was an MFA program mentor at Syracuse University, and co-taught a course with Isabelle Lutterodt at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana.

Film

In 2015, as part of a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska, Grant directed a documentary film called Taking Lena Home. The film was about returning a stolen tombstone to rural Nebraska.

Books

In 2009, Grant met actor Keanu Reeves at a social event. This led to Ode to Happiness, published by Gerhard Steidl in early 2011, Grant's first collaboration with Reeves. It was Grant's first artist book and Reeves’ first book as a writer.
In 2016, Grant and Reeves reunited for their second collaboration, Shadows, a book and suite of photographic images printed by Steidl in Germany. The photographs were exhibited at ACME Gallery in Los Angeles, and Ochi Gallery in Sun Valley, ID. As part of the release of the book, Grant did a collaboration with artist Alia Raza for Issue magazine that featured fashion and shadows.

X Artists' Books

In 2017 Grant, alongside designer Jessica Fleischmann and Keanu Reeves, established a small publishing company called X Artists Books, sometimes abbreviated XAB.

Selected awards and honors

Selected solo exhibitions