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Biography

Michael Rakowitz - Artists - Green . Art . Gallery

Michael Rakowitz perfoming Minaret, 2001-ongoing

Concerned with history and current events, Michael Rakowitz uses his work to explore pressing issues and to invite others into the conversations fostered by his public projects, installations, and events. He engages in fact-finding and makes connections with people at all opportunities, focusing on individuals involved in situations that range from the personal to the local to the geopolitical. Among his first projects is paraSITE (begun 1997), a series of inflatable homes built in consultation with the homeless people who would occupy them. Rakowitz’s own Iraqi-Jewish heritage figures prominently in many of his works, reflecting his deep connection to the country. Since 2004, with his ongoing project, RETURN, he has been attempting to import Iraqi dates into the U.S., the centerpiece of a multipart project that illustrates the cultural richness of this country in crisis.

Michael Rakowitz - Artists - Green . Art . Gallery

Food truck of Enemy Kitchen, 2003- ongoing

Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, New York) is the recipient of the 2020 Nasher Prize, the 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (Visual Arts category), a 2012 Tiffany Foundation Award; a 2008 Creative Capital Grant; a Sharjah Biennial Jury Award; a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Architecture and Environmental Structures; the 2003 Dena Foundation Award, and the 2002 Design 21 Grand Prix from UNESCO. He was awarded the Fourth Plinth commission (2018-2020) in London’s Trafalgar Square. From 2019 - 2020, a survey of Rakowitz’s work traveled from Whitechapel Gallery in London, to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Torino, to the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, marking his first major museum retrospective in the region. He was recently granted a commission for a public project on the topic of Archaeology and Migration Flows for the Municipality of The Hague.

Rakowitz’s work has appeared in various museums and biennials including: The Life of Things, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria (2024); Choosing to Portage, Tephra ICA, Reston, VA (2023); In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination Rises, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2023); Surviving the Long Wars, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (2023); Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah, UAE (2023); In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination in the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2022); Air, Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City, Utah (2022), Mardin Biennial, Mardin, Turkey (2022); Beyond Codex: Living Archives, Center for Book Arts, New York, NY (2022); ARS22, Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland (2022); Visual Nature: The Politics and Culture of Environmentalism in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal (2022); Portals, NEON, Athens, Greece (2021); Les Flammes, Musée d’Art moderne de Paris, France (2021); A Boundless Drop to A Boundless Ocean, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL (2021); Our world is burning, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2020); Assyria to America, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME (2019); and I Am Ashurbanipal King Of The World, King Of Assyria, The British Museum, London (2019) among others.

His works are featured in major private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Van Abbemuseum, Endhoven, Netherlands; The British Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Kabul National Museum, Afghanistan; UNESCO, Paris; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; Art Jameel Collection, Dubai, UAE and Tate, London, UK.

He lives and works in Chicago.

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