Michael Rakowitz

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, New York) interrogates social geographies on a local, regional, and global scale, working at the intersection of problem-solving and trouble-making. Among his first projects is paraSITE (1998-ongoing), a series of custom built inflatable structures designed for unhoused people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. More recently, Rakowitz’s work explores the geopolitical terrain and context surrounding historical and current events, revealing conventional history as a series of isolated perspectives told from various positions of privilege. In 2018, Rakowitz was awarded a public commission for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in London entitled The invisible enemy should not exist (Lamassu of Nineveh), reappearing the Assyrian deity that stood guard in Nineveh for nearly three thousand years before it was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Constructed out of 10,0000 empty  date syrup cans, Iraq’s second largest export, Rakowitz comments on the simultaneous commodification and destruction of Iraqi culture. 

Rakowitz is an artist living and working in Chicago. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di Rivoli, Telfair Museum, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, and Transmediale 05. He is the recipient of the 2018-2020 Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square; he was awarded 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 has had solo exhibitions at Creative Time, NY; Tate Modern, London, UK; The Wellin Museum of Art, NY; MCA Chicago, IL; SITE, Santa Fe, NM; Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin, DE; Rhona Hoffman, Chicago, IL; Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE; Malmö Konsthall and Tensta Konsthall, Sweden; Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria; The Graham Foundation, Chicago, IL; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai, UAE; Mason Hall Atrium Gallery, Fairfax, VA; MoCA Chicago, IL; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; Whitechapel, London, UK; The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; and Barakat Contemporary, Seoul, Korea, 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; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Van Abbemuseum, Endhoven, Netherlands; The British Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Kabul National Museum, Afghanistan; and UNESCO, Paris. Rakowitz is a Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.