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Distributed for Hirmer Publishers

An Artist’s Life

Eleanora Antinova is the fictional alter ego of influential American performance artist, filmmaker, and installation artist Eleanor Antin. A black ballerina, Antinova is said to have danced with Sergei Diaghilev’s legendary Ballet Russes, but, despite her talent, she was never given her full due within an art form where the best roles were written for white bodies, where the premium was on youth, and where classicism continued to hold cultural authority over more modernist modes of art. Ultimately, because of these cruel realities, Antinova was forgotten. But the story of her tragic role as an outsider formed the basis for Antin’s art for nearly two decades, during which she embodied the part of the tragically overlooked ballerina, depicting her plight in a series of scripted and nonscripted works.

With An Artist’s Life, Antin combines for the first time her fictional memoir of Antinova’s life with her own recollections of the time spent from the 1970s to the ’90s in the role of her most famous character. From roles in forgotten modern ballets to a career at the Ballet Russes, where she was sought as a lover and surrounded by glamorous friends, to her later years in New York, Antinova’s memoir paints an unprecedentedly rich and multifaceted picture of an aging ballerina and is illustrated with fifty stunning full-color images selected from among Antin’s many photographs, films, drawings, installations, and performances. Antin’s own journal offers further fascinating insight into how the blurred distinction between her identity and that of the Antinova enabled her to create art that speaks to the interplay between self other.

204 pages | 50 color plates | 6 3/4 x 9 1/2 | © 2016

Art: American Art


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Table of Contents

Preface
An Artist’s Life
Chapter 1- My Life Begins
Chapter 2- My Life in the Corps
Chapter 3- A Romantic Tales
Chapter 4- Russian Tales
Chapter 5- Felix
Chapter 6- After the Great War
Chapter 7- Boundaries
Chapter 8- The Third Act
Chapter 9- Waiting in the Wings
Being Antinova
Saturday, October 11
Monday, October 13
Tuesday, October 14
Wednesday, October 15
Thursday, October 16
Friday, October 17
Saturday, October 18
Sunday, October 19
Monday, October 20
Tuesday, October 21
Wednesday, October 22
Thursday, October 23
Friday, October 24
Saturday, October 25
Sunday, October 26
Monday, October 27
February, October 28
Wednesday, October 29
Thursday, October 30
Friday, October 31
Image Credits
Imprint
 

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