Dissecting the gender biases and ideological subtexts underlying mass media imagery, Dara Birnbaum has been on the vanguard of video and installation art for more than four decades. Among the first artists to create complex installations that juxtapose videos from multiple monitors with supporting physical structures, Birnbaum fuses video with sculpture and architecture. Emerging as a part of the feminist art movement of the 1970s, she uses techniques including appropriation, repetition, and interruption to deconstruct and critique visual representations of women in popular culture, especially television. Reconfiguring images and sounds from television is, according to Birnbaum, “to manipulate a medium which is itself highly manipulative.” Over the course of her career, Birnbaum’s critiques have broadened to include global politics, animation, and digital imagery.

–Daniel Mauro, from the Glenstone Field Guide