Amber Ginsburg

Amber Ginsburg
le Museé de le Grand Dehors |The Museum of the Great Outdoors, Amber Ginsburg, Sara Black, Charlie Vinz. Thailand Biennale, 2019
Lecturer, Visual Arts
Logan Center 237
Teaching at UChicago since 2009

I am a Chicago based artist teaching at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts. I create site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into present day situations, as well as engage present day histories to imagine alternative futures.

My background in craft orients my projects toward the continuities and ruptures in material and social histories. I often work with long-term and ongoing collaborators and together we engage multiple communities and elicit working relationships with experts in the fields of botany, political activism, biology, legal scholarship and activism, and science fiction.

Always interested in history, more recently, I have been drawn to imagined futures, specifically a future that includes human survival. Looking to past feminist strategies, including collective action and equity politics, I work in large-scale sculptural forms that allow audiences a role in thinking through the making or completing the work. The boundary between human and nonhuman agency is pressing thinner. I follow specific material lineages, sometimes a tree species, sometimes porcelain, to map our varied and complex relationships. In doing so, I  work in concert with objects as collaborators, agent-provocateurs, and narrative instigators.

amberginsburg.com
 

Selected Publications

"7000 Marks," text by Sara Black and Amber Ginsburg, in Antennae, Journal of Nature and Visual Culture, Issue 44, Summer, 2018. Download text

"The Labor Issue: Questionnaire," Interview with Sara Black and Amber Ginsburg, in Open Set, May, 2017. View text

"In a Tea Ritual, Stopping Time and Reflecting on War with a Veteran," text by Gretchen Combs, in Hyperallergic, February 5, 2016. View text

Emergency INDEX: An Annual Document of Performance Practice. Vol. 3., edited by Yelena Gluzman  and Matvei Yankelevich, 2014

"Rooting: Interview with Amber Ginsburg," Interview by Sarah Benning, in Rooting: Regional Networks, Global ConcernsMarch, 2013. View text