Clifford Owens is an interdisciplinary artist. He makes photographs, performance art, drawings, videos, and texts. His art has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Owens’s solo museum exhibitions include Anthology at MoMA PS1, Better the Rebel You Know at the former Cornerhouse in Manchester, England, and Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His group exhibitions include Freestyle, Greater New York 2005, and Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century. Owens’s performance-based projects have been widely presented in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Owens has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other fellowships and awards.
BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. MFA, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Postgraduate, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Fellowships: Guggenheim Fellowship, William H. Johnson Prize, Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, Art Matters, New York Foundation for the Arts, Ralph Bunche Graduate Fellowship, others. Solo exhibitions: MoMA PS1 (Queens, New York), Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (Houston, Texas), Cornerhouse (Manchester, England). Group exhibitions: Walker Arts Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, Museum of Modern Art, others. Projects and performances: Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Performa05, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, others. Collections: Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, private collections. Publication: Anthology, edited by Christopher Y. Lew; includes contributions by Kellie Jones, Huey Copeland, and John P. Bowles. Reviews and interviews: The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Bomb, The Drama Review, New York Magazine. Published writing: The New York Times, PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art, Artforum, exhibition catalogues. Artist in residence: Artpace International Artist in Residence (San Antonio, Texas), MacDowell Colony (Peterborough, New Hampshire) Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (Brooklyn, NY), Studio Museum in Harlem Artist in Residence (New York, NY), others. Owens has been a critic at Columbia University and Yale University, and visiting artist faculty at Cooper Union, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
