Born and raised in New York, she now heads the Los Angeles design consultancy Made in Space.
"The Masters Series: April Greiman" will be on view from October 20 through December 13, 2008, at the Visual Arts Museum, 209 East 23rd Street, New York City. April Greiman's unique contribution to visual culture is evident in the breadth of her portfolio, with commissions ranging from a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the Nineteenth Amendment (which extended the vote to women) to an LED installation for the 31-story Accenture Tower in Minneapolis.
These works will be represented in the exhibition at SVA alongside a selection of groundbreaking posters, identity systems, and recent experimental videos and digital photographs. Long interested in the built environment, Greiman has frequently collaborated with architects, among them Frank Gehry and Michael Rotondi of RoTo Architects.
Image: Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice at Wilshire Vermont Station, Los Angeles, 2007. Courtesy of Made in Space.
For this retrospective, she has sought guidance from the "gravity consultants" at RoTo Architects and B+U, a Los Angeles architecture firm whose work is informed by mapping and transforming imperceptible forces, including sonograms, sounds, and magnetism.
Greiman is renowned for her experiments with the Apple Macintosh computer, having acquired one shortly after its release in 1984. At about the same time, she began to merge video, a medium she had worked with since the 1970s, with print graphics. Using digitized images that flaunted their electronic origins, she set about unleashing the creative potential of the latest technologies.
In 1987, she received a grant from the National Endowment for theArts to explore Web and state-of-the-art technology like Quantel PaintBox, software used to create video and graphics for television. She started Greimanski Labs as an offshoot of her studio to research the capacity of newtechnologies for image making in a non-commercial setting.
She has created identities and Web sites for institutions like the Southern CaliforniaInstitute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, the Los Angeles satellite of the Austrian Museum of Applied Art, Vienna. In her work with architects, Greiman has been much sought-after for herexpertise in color, surfaces and materials, whether applied to buildinginteriors, exteriors or campuses.
More recently, Greiman has secured a number of high-profile public art commissions that extend her exploration of the "color-surfaces-materials" field and continue to push the boundaries between disciplines. She recently completed an 8,200 square-foot wall mural entitled. "Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice" at Wilshire Vermont Station, a new housing development sited on the Los Angeles Metro line in Koreatown, and is at work on a project for the Burbank airport.
The Visual Arts Museum, located at 209 East 23rd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, is open 9 am to 7 pm, Monday through Friday, and 10 am to 6 pm on Saturday.
Admission is free. The museum is accessible by wheelchair. For further information, call 212.592.2144.
October 20 ¬ December 13, 2008
Visual Arts Museum Reception: Monday, October 20, 6 ¬ 8pm
Lecture: Tuesday, October 21, 7pm
Free admission