1. Dorit Cypis's work has collectively explored themes of identity, history and social relations through installation art, photography, performance and social practice.
18 Facts About Dorit Cypis
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Dorit Cypis's work has often moved between studio and social practice, including the direction and creation of initiatives in Minneapolis and Los Angeles bridging art and social change.
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Dorit Cypis has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and City of Los Angeles, among others.
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Aya Dorit Cypis was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1951.
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Dorit Cypis exhibited widely, including shows at The Clocktower Gallery, Artists Space and White Columns in New York and LACE in Los Angeles.
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Dorit Cypis eventually attracted wider attention for increasingly politicized work that was influenced by cinema, music and dance, with shows at the Whitney Museum, New Museum, SFMOMA, and Walker Art Center, among others.
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Dorit Cypis founded Kulture Klub Collaborative, a project involving artists and homeless teens that bridged creative expression and survival.
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Dorit Cypis integrated photomontage and projection, performance and movement, sound and spectator involvement, often upending the roles of viewer and viewed.
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In subsequent exhibitions, Dorit Cypis broadened her examinations of identity, drawing comparisons to Carolee Schneemann and Cindy Sherman.
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The Prisoner's Dilemma series examined disempowerment in situations of limited knowledge ; the images depict Dorit Cypis staring into a one-way mirror from inside the temporary jail of a California court, with reflective surfaces and architectural disruptions creating a dislocating, panopticon-like environment.
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Dorit Cypis turned to installations based on news images in the mid-2000s, which she recontextualized or recombined to yield new narratives.
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In Sightlines, Dorit Cypis staged a dialogue of displaced looks using mirrors and photographs of sculptural likenesses she commissioned from a forensic scientist working on the case of missing girls in Juarez, Mexico; the likenesses depict two women Dorit Cypis saw on a Newsweek cover, a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli resembling one another who were both killed when the Palestinian detonated herself.
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Dorit Cypis has since delved further into personal identity in relation to history, politics and society.
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Dorit Cypis has developed several public programs in Los Angeles, many involving communities and law enforcement.
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Dorit Cypis presented One Another, an interactive presentation exploring strategies for intimate engagement across difference, in 2019 at NAVEL in Los Angeles.
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In 2014, Dorit Cypis was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, and an SPArt Award for artists in the field of social practice.
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Dorit Cypis has received multiple awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, McKnight Foundation and Jerome Foundation, and single awards from the Japan Foundation, Bush Foundation, Durfee Foundation, City of Los Angeles, Fellows of Contemporary Art, and American Jewish University.
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Dorit Cypis's work belongs to the public collections of the International Center of Photography, National Gallery of Canada, Fonds regional d'art contemporain in France, Walker Art Center, Center for Creative Photography, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Orange County Museum of Art, among others.