Trisha Donnelly


Trisha Donnelly is a contemporary artist who is particularly well known as a conceptual artist. Donnelly works with various media including photography, drawing, audio, video, sculpture and performance. Donnelly is also a Clinical Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University. She currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Early life

Trisha Donnelly was born on April 22, 1974 in San Francisco, California. In 1995 Donnelly received a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the University of California in Los Angeles. In 2000 she attained a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale University.

Career

Donnelly has been on the faculty at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development since 2008. She is a Clinical Associate Professor of Studio Art.
In 2012, Donnelly was the tenth artist to curate Artist's Choice, an exhibition curated by artists of artworks from the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In the exhibition, "she was after 'striking voices'" she couldn't let go of, "'paths of encounters and building poetic structures... images that go beyond images themselves."' The exhibition included works by artists such as Eliot Porter, Joe Goode, Gertrude Kasebier, Wendy Carlos, and John Whitney. The audio guide provided for the show was art historian Robert Rosenblum discussing MoMA's 1989 Picasso retrospective. Donnelly explained, "The feeling when listening to these audio guides was, this was a great work of art... or work of whatever, work of another entity, or another state and dimension, existing... are so beautiful... It's like the Taj Mahal of languages, building it himself. By the end, I don't need the exhibition at all. I'm awash in this ocean of his funny, brilliant voice."

Select solo exhibitions

Donnelly's work can be found in a number of public collections, including:
In 2017 Donnelly was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Museum Ludwig. Suzanne Cotter, director of Mudam Luxembourg, said of Donnelly in recognition of the award: “Trisha Donnelly is without doubt one of the most compelling artists of our time whose work offers entirely new ways of experiencing and thinking about form, at once synaesthesic and disruptively transporting."
In 2012 Donnelly was awarded the inaugural Faber-Castell International Drawing Award by the Neues Museum.
In 2010 Donnelly was awarded with the LUMA Foundation Photography Prize. In his 2012 Review "The Best of the Basement", critic Jerry Saltz recognized Donnelly as "a rare case of artistic love at first sight".

Art market

Donnelly is currently represented by Matthew Marks Gallery, Air de Paris, and Galarie Eva Presenhuber.