Michael Rakowitz

MICHAEL RAKOWITZ

Deenie Yudell Resident in the Visual Arts

Based in Chicago, Michael Rakowitz is a sculptor, an installation and mixed-media artist, and professor of art theory and practice at Northwestern University. His work, often created in collaboration with studio assistants and other workers, centers on connecting people, places, and historical narratives across centuries by reimagining lost and looted artifacts, architecture, and cultures using ordinary everyday objects and materials.

His work, whose subjects range from ancient Middle Eastern kingdoms to nineteenth-century colonial powers to contemporary political situations, has been shown internationally. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago hosted his first US museum survey, Backstroke of the West, in 2017. A year later he produced a commissioned work for the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square in 2018, re-creating an ancient stone statue (ca. 700 BC) from the Nineveh city gates, destroyed by the Islamic State in 2015, using ten thousand empty cans of Iraqi date syrup.