Ann McCoy
American, born 1946

Untitled, 1978
offset color lithograph
20 1⁄2 x 29 3/8 in.

SBMA, Gift of Charles Craig, Contemporary Graphics Center, and the William Dole Fund
1978.38







Portrait of artist Ann McCoy, Long Island City, New York, 2000.

COMMENTS

Ann McCoy is a New York-based sculptor and painter whose career began in 1972. She is a working artist as well as a curator and art critic who writes for the Brooklyn Rail. McCoy taught in the Art History Department at Barnard College from 1980 through 2000. Her Barnard class appeared in the documentary Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, which won the Amsterdam Film Festival. She lectures on art history, the history of projection, and mythology in Visual Story Telling. McCoy is a member of 829 Local. She has written about artists working with projection including William Kentridge, Tony Oursler, Nalini Malini, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Her work is included in the following collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the Roy L. Neuberger Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Ann McCoy has received the following awards: the Asian Cultural Council, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, the Award in the Visual Arts, the Prix de Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Berliner Kunstler Program D.A.A.D., and the New Talent Award of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has shown work in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Annual, and has had one-person exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, New Delhi, Poland, and Berlin. She is known primarily known for her large format drawings, work with projection, installation, and sculpture. She designs for the stage in projection.

Ann McCoy worked with Prof. C.A. Meier, Jung’s heir apparent for twenty-five years in Zurich. She has a background in Jungian psychology and philosophy, and she studies alchemy.

http://drama.yale.edu/facstaff/ann-mccoy


SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Influenced heavily by the principles of alchemy and Jungian psychology, Ann McCoy’s work includes dream-like landscapes populated with psychic metaphors and symbols of transformation. This print is part of McCoy’s Night Sea series which she began in Berlin in 1977 after she had a dream that she was floating in a black sea in the dark. The imagery for the series is inspired by a multitude of sources including her time scuba diving at night in Australia, her research in the Neville Coleman archive of underwater photography, and 17th-century alchemical writings on celestial bodies, all culminating in what McCoy describes as “visions in the shadow of the sun.”

- The Observable Universe: Visualizing the Cosmos in Art, 2019