18 Facts About Jeff Wassmann

Jeff Wassmann was born on April 2,1958 and is an American artist, writer and theorist, currently living in Melbourne, Australia.

Jeff Wassmann was born in Mars, Pennsylvania, the youngest of four children.

Jeff Wassmann's father was an engineer and worked in the steel industry.

Jeff Wassmann's mother trained as a chemist and research librarian, later worked as a school librarian and was active in local politics.

Jeff Wassmann grew up in a family with a strong feminist legacy; his paternal grandmother ran the office of Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot; his maternal grandmother taught at the American University of Beirut Hospital.

At the age of seven Jeff Wassmann contracted rheumatic fever, was hospitalised and left with a heart murmur.

Jeff Wassmann travelled to Timaru, New Zealand in 1975 as an exchange student, where he attended Timaru Boys' High School; he graduated from North Allegheny High School in Wexford, Pennsylvania the following year.

Jeff Wassmann studied postcolonial theory in the 1970s with Edward Said's mentor, friend and colleague, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, at Northwestern University's Institute for African Studies in Chicago, where he majored in political science and international studies.

Jeff Wassmann later studied parliamentary politics in Wellington, New Zealand as a Richter Scholar before returning to Chicago, where he worked variously as an artist, writer and photojournalist.

Jeff Wassmann first encountered the boxed assemblage and collage works of Joseph Cornell at the Art Institute of Chicago in the mid-1970s, not long after the artist's death in 1972.

Jeff Wassmann would go on to spend several years studying with the German cabinetmaker Ernst Zacher and would not undertake his first boxed work until he had reached the maturity of his early forties.

Jeff Wassmann would remain devoted to Christian Science throughout his life.

Jeff Wassmann is the creator of two equally fictitious institutions, The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, DC and MuseumZeitraum Leipzig.

In doing so, Jeff Wassmann raises questions about our prescribed notion of progress, concurrent with the views of the conceptual artist Tino Sehgal.

In 2006 Jeff Wassmann was honoured as a Governor of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Jeff Wassmann served as a board member of the Australian Art Orchestra from 2006 to 2009.

Jeff Wassmann is founding director of Bleeding Napoleon Pty Ltd, a not-for-profit arts charity funding performance and installation works.

Jeff Wassmann suffers from Fuchs' dystrophy, a genetic disorder with the degenerative loss of corneal cells, leading to corneal edema and severe loss of sight.