Cynthia Greig
Artist Bio
Cynthia Greig lives and works in metropolitan Detroit. Since 1990 she has been making work that explores the exchange of influence between perception and experience, and the photograph’s unique role in negotiating what we consider to be real or true.
Her photographs, installations and videos have been exhibited in museums and galleries both in the US and abroad including the Alternative Museum in New York, Boston Center for the Arts, Rena Bransten Gallery and San Francisco Camerawork, Harvestworks, NYC, Houston Center for Photography, Museum of New Art, Detroit, SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, Gallery 44, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, Art Gallery of Windsor in Canada, UNO Art Space, Stuttgart, Focal Point Gallery in England, Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, Foto Arte Brasilia and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin.
Her work is held in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, George Eastman House, Museum of Contemporary Photograpy, Chicago, Light Work, Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz NY, Smith College Museum of Art, Northamptom, MA, Wellington Management Collection, Boston, Seattle Arts Commission, as well as numerous private collections throughout North and South America and Europe. She is the recipient of several awards, most recently having been selected as one of four runners up for the 2007 Aperture Portfolio Prize. Prior awards include the Santa Fe Center for Photography’s Assignment Earth/Single Image Award (2004), the Houston Center for Photography Fellowship (2003), and an artist residency at Light Work (2001).
She’s an avid collector nineteenth-century photography and in addition to her own imagemaking, she co-authored the book of vintage photographs, Women in Pants: Manly Maidens, Cowgirls and Other Renegades which was inspired by her invention of the fictional 19th-century cross-dressing photographer, Isabelle Raymond, a persona Greig performed both in front of and behind the camera for her installation New Eden. The book chronicles through photographs the less celebrated history of the countless women—actresses, soldiers, lesbians, athletes, adventurers, laborers to name a few—who dared to wear trousers before long before pants became an accepted clothing option for women. The book was published by Harry N. Abrams in 2003. Greig received her MFA in 1995 from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor after studying art history and filmmaking at the University of Iowa where she received her MA in 1988, and also co-founded the Tristan Tzara School of Poetry with Joyce Beatty and Todd Nelson.
Cynthia Greig at Clark Gallery
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