Dara Birnbaum, The 1946-born American video and installation artist Dara Birnbaum died on May 2, 2025. Birnbaum entered video art in the mid- to late-1970s to challenge sexism and television’s dominance in American households. Video art, YouTube, and television are her major mediums for exploring media’s aesthetics and ideology.
Her reconstruction of television imagery included material from quiz shows, soap operas, and sports programs. Her art features repeated images, text, and music that interrupt the flow. The mid-1970s feminist video art movement made her famous. New York was Birnbaum’s home and office.
Dara Birnbaum Obituary : His Biography and Legal Legacy
Dara Birnbaum Background and education
Dara Birnbaum was born in NYC in 1946. She was born to architect Philip Birnbaum and pathologist Mary Birnbaum. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1969 with a BA in architecture. Her next job was with San Francisco architectural firm Lawrence Halprin & Associates. She developed a lifelong interest in civic space and popular culture’s public-private divide while working at the company. Birnbaum graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1973 with a painting degree.
Dara Birnbaum An artistic career
Centrale Diffusione Grafica, an early video art supporter, introduced Birnbaum to the technology during his 1974 yearlong stay in Florence. Meeting visual artist, writer, and curator Dan Graham soon after her 1975 return to New York City shaped Birnbaum’s artistic progress. He introduced her to Screen (journal), a British periodical that critically investigated 1970s popular filmmaking. Birnbaum found Screen’s coverage of a new feminist paradigm for cinema critique intriguing, but she thought it disregarded television, which she believed had surpassed film as the most powerful media in American popular culture.
Birnbaum used a Sony Portapak borrowed from poet, writer, and thinker Alan Sondheim to make Control Piece and Mirroring in the mid-1970s. These works used mirrors and projected images to explore the body-image gap. Mirrors appeared in her late 1970s videos, when she focused on imitating television conventions. She used stolen images to repeat and deconstruct TV clichés to study its technical architecture and physiological movements.
A sad farewell today to an old friend of mine, American artist Dara Birnbaum (1946-2025). Dara was especially known for her video art, and her piece “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” (1978–79) in particular. She will long continue to inspire others!
— Robin Rimbaud – Scanner (@scannerdot.com) 2025-05-03T10:00:33.519Z
These studies laid the framework for her 1978–1979 video art installation Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman. Copying Wonder Woman footage allowed the artist to undermine its ideological connotations. “Opening with a prolonged salvo of fiery explosions accompanied by the warning cry of a siren, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman is supercharged, action-packed, and visually rriveting; throughout its nearly six minutes, we see several scenes featuring the main character, Diana Prince,in which she transforms into the famed superhero.” She references Wonder Woman to indicate her interest in “television on television,” which involves exploring the television/video medium independently, studying TV program structure, and engaging with the media.
She started making collages of stolen film snippets in 1979 while working at a television post-production facility. Birnbaum created PM Magazine/Acid Rock in 1982 using Wang Computers ads and PM Magazine video. The artwork was originally a four-channel video installation at Documenta 7, but Electronic Arts Intermix released it as a single-channel video with a soundtrack by Simeon Soffer. PM Magazine/Acid Rock highlights Birnbaum’s feminism, consumerism, and television themes with pop visuals and a reworked version of “L.A. Woman” by The Doors. Birnbaum recorded Glenn Branca’s Symphony no. 1 at the Performing Garage for Electronic Arts Intermix in 1981. She attended the 1985 Whitney Biennial.
In her 1990 single-channel video Canopy: Marching to the Street, she invokes the May 1968 Paris revolt and intercuts student footage from a 1987 Princeton University Take Back the Night march to define the political act of marching.
Hostage, a 1994 six-channel film, is about Hanns-Martin Schleyer’s 1977 kidnapping.
Technology/Transformation: The Smithsonian, Whitney, Metropolitan, and Museum of Modern Art have Wonder Woman. Some of her famous collections include the National Gallery of Canada, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Gent, Belgium.
Dara Birnbaum Awards
Birnbaum received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art (2024), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021), a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency (2011), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2011), and a United States Artists Fellow (2010). She became the first woman to get the Maya Deren Award for video from the American Film Institute in 1987. CMU created the Birnbaum Award in 2017 to commemorate her.
Honoring Dara Birnbaum
In moments like these, we feel the loss deeply. Dara Birnbaum left a lasting impact on many lives.
If you have any memories or thoughts to share, please feel free to leave a comment below. Let’s come together to remember and celebrate her life.
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