34 Facts About Peter Halley

Peter Halley was born on 1953 and is an American artist and a central figure in the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s.

Peter Halley came to prominence as an artist in the mid-1980s, as part of the generation of Neo-Conceptualist artists that first exhibited in New York's East Village, including Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sarah Charlesworth, Annette Lemieux, Steven Parrino, Phillip Taaffe, and Gretchen Bender.

Peter Halley is known for his critical writings, which, beginning in the 1980s, linked the ideas of French Post-Structuralist theorists including Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard to the digital revolution and the visual arts.

From 1996 to 2005, Peter Halley published Index Magazine, which featured in-depth interviews with emergent and established figures in fashion, music, film, and other creative fields.

Peter Halley is the son of Janice Halley, a registered nurse of Polish ancestry, and Rudolph Halley, an attorney and politician of German-Austrian Jewish descent.

In 1951, Rudolph "became an instant celebrity," as Peter Halley has said, while serving as chief prosecutor for the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, known as the Kefauver Committee.

Peter Halley served as president of the New York City Council from 1951 to 1953, and unsuccessfully ran for New York City Mayor in 1953.

Peter Halley died soon after at the age of forty-three, when Halley was three years old.

Peter Halley is related to Samuel Shipman, a well-known and colorful writer of Broadway comedies in the 1920s.

Peter Halley later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a prep school known for its art museum and, at the time, innovative art program.

Peter Halley received college acceptances with full scholarships from Brown, Harvard, and Yale, but chose to study at Yale because of their renowned art program.

But, after his sophomore year, Peter Halley was denied entry into the art major and decided to move to New Orleans, where he lived for one year.

Peter Halley returned to Yale the following year to study art history, and wrote his senior thesis on Henri Matisse before graduating in 1975.

Peter Halley received his MFA in 1978 and lived in New Orleans until 1980.

In 1980, Peter Halley returned to New York City and moved into a loft on East 7th Street in the East Village, Manhattan; there, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne was his upstairs neighbor.

New York City had a lasting influence on Peter Halley's distinct painting style.

Peter Halley began to use fluorescent Day-Glo paint, which has an uncanny glow that recalls the artificial lights of postmodern society and the bright government-issued signs that mark streets and workers' clothing.

Peter Halley began to employ Roll-a-Tex, a textural additive that gives his "cells" and "prisons" a tactile, architectural quality, as Roll-a-Tex is most often used as surfacing in buildings such as suburban homes and motels.

The postmodern, commodity-like color and texture, not to mention the thickness, of Peter Halley's canvases entered them into the art-historical conversation surrounding painting and objecthood.

Peter Halley staged solo projects at PS122 Gallery in 1980 and at the East Village bar Beulah Land in 1984.

Around this time, Peter Halley introduced Jeff Koons to Vaisman, and Koons subsequently exhibited at International with Monument as well.

Peter Halley published his first essay "Beat, Minimalism, New Wave, and Robert Smithson" in 1981 in Arts Magazine, a New York-based publication that published seven more of his essays throughout that decade.

Peter Halley highlighted the various roles of new wave music, Cold War cultural politics, and the increased digitization of experience brought about by computers and video games.

In 1993, Peter Halley created Superdream Mutation, a digital print available for viewing and downloading on the web bulletin board-style platform The Thing.

Peter Halley began using Adobe Illustrator as a means of developing his compositions.

Peter Halley began to explore printmaking, using a variety of techniques including silkscreen, digital, and inkjet printing.

Peter Halley created his first site-specific installation at the Dallas Museum of Art; this installation included paintings, silkscreen prints, wallpaper, and murals of flow charts and other images.

In 2002, Peter Halley was commissioned by architects Abalos and Herreros for their recently completed public library in a working-class neighborhood populated by university students in the district of Usera, in Madrid.

The architects wanted to cover the interior walls with text imagery and invited Peter Halley to undertake the project.

Peter Halley designed wall murals using the text from Jorge Luis Borges' story, La Biblioteca de Babel.

In 2018, Peter Halley had a show of paintings at the Lever House on Park Avenue in New York City.

Peter Halley created an installation for the show in the exterior-facing windows of the Lever House, in which the light exuding from the windows was tinted fluorescent chartreuse.

Peter Halley has taught and lectured at universities continuously throughout his career, both in the United States and abroad, including the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Vienna, Harvard University, and Hunter College of Art.

Peter Halley has two children, Isabel Halley, a ceramicist, and Thomas Halley, a pre-school teacher.