Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham, born in 1940, is one of the most influential artists today, not least for younger generations of artists and curators. Of his art he says that it “works against the two foundations of the European tradition: Belief and Architecture.” Sculpture, seen as the coming together of object, image, and word, is fundamental to his practice, but he is also a poet, essayist, and educator. Durham’s life as an artist began in the mid-1960s in Texas. In the early 1970s he worked in Geneva. In the late 1970s he was a political organizer with the American Indian Movement, Director of the International Indian Treaty Council and its representative to the United Nations. In New York around 1980 he turned once again to art. Between 1987 and 1994 he was based in Mexico, and thereafter in Europe, or, as he prefers to say, in Eurasia. This generously illustrated book is published to accompany Durham’s exhibition at M HKA, Antwerp. Featuring more than 100 works from all his creative periods, it contains major new essays, as well as new texts by Durham himself.