Stephen Prina AMERICAN, b. 1954

Stephen Prina, an artist whose deconstructive and playful approach to culture, art, language, and authorship often begets the label “post-Conceptualist”, addresses the institutions, markets, and historiography that shape our perception of art. Believing an artwork “only has meaning when it enters the social sphere and meets its audience,” Prina’s artistic practice includes installations, performance, sculpture, and painting that centers on what happens to art when it leaves the studio. For instance, he conceived a traveling spectacle for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, in which he mouthed lyrics appropriated from public testimonials by contributors. “His exhibition making can be seen as a kind of overarching work itself,” wrote critic Dominic Eichler. “Certainly, his fastidious and almost exaggerated attention to framing, labeling, forms of display, presentation and cataloguing seem to approach institutional parody without being overtly didactic.”