American artist Eleanor Antin has defied convention throughout her career, demonstrated by the fluidity of her artistic expression. Her practice includes sculpture, filmmaking, performance, and photography. Engaging with the Conceptual art movement of the 1960s, she amplified feminist themes, political and cultural critique, and historical reinterpretation. The flexibility of her media selection is mirrored in her embodiment of a range of alter egos featured in her performances, through which she staked her agency in an art world dominated by men. Reflecting on her practice in the 1974 article “Notes on Transformation” for Flash Art, Antin wrote, “I consider the usual aids to self-definition—sex, age, talent, time, and space—as tyrannical limitations upon my freedom of choice.”

–Julia Grasso Bergman, from the Glenstone Field Guide