User:MinklesJ/subpage Renee Petropoulos

Renée Petropoulos is a contemporary artist who currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

BIOGRAPHY
Renée Petropoulos was born in Los Angeles and received her B.A. in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1974 and then her M.A. in Photography and Video, 1977, and her M.F.A. in Studio Art, 1979- both from UCLA. Petropoulos is represented by Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, California and is a professor at Otis College of Art and Design in the Graduate Fine Arts, Graduate Public Practice and Graduate Graphic Design departments.

In the late 1970's Petropoulos did video collaborative public performances with artists Markar Melkonian, John Jebb and Ante Bozanich. This led to the collaboration of John and Renée on a series of video portraits produced for cable television, including artists Ulysses Jenkins, Patti Podesta, Mitchell Syrop, David Lamelas, Nancy Buchanan and more. Another gallery artist, Grant Mudford, took portraits of the Rosamund Felsen gallery artists, including one of Renée, which is part of the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.



Petropoulos then started making room-sized paintings applied directly onto the wall, that existed only for the duration of the exhibitions. These projects culminated in her first public commissioned project, “Seven Centers”, installed on the ceiling at the historic LA Public Library in Downtown L.A. This work integrated her sustained interest in language, decoration and site-situated artworks. In the early 1990’s, she had several consecutive exhibitions entitled “The Whistle and the Laughter”, “People Potentially Going to Libya”, “Cymbals”, “Fundamental Beliefs”, “The Chicken or the Egg” and “Set Free to Roam the World: A Study in Similarities and Differences”, which began her investigation of mapping, power and the information of the periphery. It was at this time she began working with text as a primary form, which was explored in the exhibition "Tangles" (1996), curated with then gallery director, Anne Ayres, at Otis College's Ben Maltz Gallery. Petropoulos later curated an exhibition about the act of collecting as a reasearch tool in the exhibition "Neotoma" (1995), looking at the impulse to collect, subjectivity and its manifestations as research and inspiration for subsequent artworks. Artists in that exhibition included Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Andrea Bowers, Roy Dowell, Pae White, Uta Barth and Cameron Jamie's among others. In 1996, Petropoulos curated the exhibition, "Interiors: Francis Alÿs, Kevin Appel, Robin Tewes" for LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Recent performance piece “Analog (Mostly) Among Nations” has been delivered as a College Art Association project curated by Sherin Gurguis, exhibited at the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Iteration 4 The Women at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and MAK Center at the Schindler House, West Hollywood.

Renee Petropoulos has made public artworks locally more recently with Metro lines. For the public projects, "YOUR MOVE", Philadelphia, and "THIS ISA NICE NEIGHBORHOOD", San Franciscio, Petropoulos collaborated with her partner Roger F. White as well as artist Daniel Joseph Martinez. Petropoulos was chosen to be one of ten artists to participate in "10 Houses X 10 Artists," an ongoing artist/architecture project organized by OpenOffice, New York from 1997-1999.

Petropoulos has an illustrious career as an educator and has taught at Otis for over 20 years. She currently runs the Visiting Artist Lecture series for the Graduate Department there. She has been a visiting faculty member/artist lecturer at the New School, New York; UCLA; University of Umeå, Konsthogskaolan, Umeå, Sweden; CalArts, Valencia, CA; University of California, Irvine, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena; University of Southern California; and California State University, Northridge.

Petropoulos has delivered lectures on her work and other topics at many arts education institutions and museums, such as: California Community Foundation; Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Hammer Series at the Armand Hammer Museum, UCLA; Pasadena Community College; Loyola Marymount University; University of California, Santa Barbara; California State University, Long Beach; San Francisco Art Institute; New School for Social Research; the Sandberg Institut, Amsterdam; the Art Academy, Umeå, Sweden; Los Angeles Public Library; Caochandgi, Bejing, China and the Art Academy, Vienna, Austria.

Currently, Petropoulos is a board member of SASSAS, The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound. Petropoulos fostered a collaboration between SASSAS and Otis to create a 24-hour L.A. Free Music Society streaming live event of continuous sound and music. She also initiated a restaging of an event that took place at Otis in the 1970’s done in conjunction with Meg Linton and the Ben Maltz Gallery and was staged in the video lab of the Ahmanson Building. Petropoulos has also served on Public Art Panles for the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs, City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs and the City of Seattle Cultural Affairs department.