Dorit Cypis

Dorit Cypis (; born 1951, Tel Aviv) is a Canadian-American artist, mediator and educator based in Los Angeles.Johnson, Reed
"‘Rethinking Borders’: Urging both sides to an understanding,"
''Los Angeles Times'', November 7, 2011. Retrieved October 7, 2020.Kobialka, Michal. "Aya Dorit Cypis," ''COLA 07'', Los Angeles: Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, 2007 Retrieved October 5, 2020, p. 19–21. Her work has collectively explored themes of identity, history and social relations through installation art, photography, performance and social practice.Armstrong, Elizabeth. "Girl, Unmasked," ''Girl's Night Out'', Elizabeth Armstrong and Irene Hoffman, Santa Ana, CA: Orange County Museum of Art, 2003.Rothfuss, Joan and Elizabeth Carpenter. ''Bits & pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole: Walker Art Center collections'', Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. p. 180, 2005.Cai, Judy
"Understanding Conflict through Art,"
''NeonTommy'', Annenberg Media Center, November 11, 2014. Retrieved October 7, 2020. After graduating from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), she attracted attention in the 1980s and 1990s for her investigations of the female body, presented in immersive installation-performances at the Whitney Museum,Furlong, Lucinda. "Dorit Cypis," ''The New American Filmmakers Series'', (No. 40),New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. International Center of Photography,Ledes, Richard C
"Dorit Cypis,"
''Artforum'', January 1990, p. 139. Retrieved October 5, 2020. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),Reveau, Tony. "Fleeting Phantoms: 'The Projected Image' at SFMOMA," ''Artweek'', March 28, 1991, p. 20–1. and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.Hagen, Charles
"Turning the Lens Inward,"
''The New York Times'', September 22, 1991, Sect. 2, p. 34. Retrieved October 5, 2020. Counter to much feminist work of the time, Cypis focused on interiority and personal mythologies rather than exterior political realms, and according to art historian Elizabeth Armstrong, made a significant contribution to discourse about the representation of women and female sexuality.Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "Sexual Difference: Both Sides of the Camera," New York: Columbia University, Wallach Art Gallery, 1988.Campbell, Clayton. "Dorit Cypis and Hildegard Duane at Jancar Gallery," ''Artweek'', August 23, 2009.

Cypis's work has often moved between studio and social practice, including the direction and creation of initiatives in Minneapolis and Los Angeles bridging art and social change.Sugand, Dyvia
"Peacebuilding Through an Artist’s Perspective, Member Spotlight: Dorit Cypis,"
Mediators Beyond Borders International, October 19, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2020. As a mediator, she has worked in the Middle East and Los Angeles on conflict engagement issues including Arab-Jewish and police-community relations.Carey, Brainard
"Dorit Cypis,"
''WYBC Yale Radio'', June 30, 2017. Retrieved October 9, 2020. Her later art has shifted toward broader considerations of identity related to history, memory, space and geopolitics, and been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Orange County Museum of Art. Cypis has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and City of Los Angeles, among others.''Artforum''
"2014 Guggenheim Fellows Announced,"
News. April 10, 2014. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Heffley, Lynne

''Los Angeles Times'', September 16, 2006. Retrieved October 7, 2020.Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
"Meet the Artists: Rauschenberg Residency 9."
November 7, 2014. Retrieved October 7, 2020.

Early life and career

Aya Dorit Cypis was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1951.Hartshorn, Willis. ''The Naked Nude'', New York: International Center of Photography (ICP), 1989. In 1958, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada.Helleckson, Diane. "The Naked Truth," ''St. Paul Pioneer Press'', October 10, 1992. After exploring sociology at Sir George Williams University, she graduated with degrees in art education and fine art in 1974 from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, studying with conceptual artists Garry Neill Kennedy and David Askevold.Heartney, Eleanor. ''Dorit Cypis: X-Rayed, (altered)'', Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University, Anderson Gallery, 1990.Griffin, Kevin
"Art Seen: Garry Neil Kennedy changed the art rules in Canada in the '60s,"
''Vancouver Sun'', October 30, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2020. In 1977, she completed an MFA at Cal Arts, whose faculty at the time included Michael Asher and John Baldessari;Myers, Holly
"David Askevold made it all perfectly unclear,"
''Los Angeles Times'', August 3, 2012. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Oursler, Tony
"Tony Oursler,"
''Artforum'', May 2012. Retrieved October 5, 2020. among her early work was the feminist performative video, ''Exploring Comfort''.Wark, Jayne. ''Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America'', Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006, p. 190–1.National Gallery of Canada
''Exploring Comfort'', Dorit Cypis
Collection. Retrieved October 7, 2020.

After graduating, Cypis directed Foundation for Art Resources (FAR), a Los Angeles nonprofit that partnered artists with private and public organizations to site art within the city from 1976 to 2016.Umolo, Yesomi
"Identity and Institutionalization: Dorit Cypis on Minneapolis in the '80s,"
''Sightlines'', Walker Art Center, 2012. Retrieved October 6, 2020. She exhibited widely, including shows at The Clocktower Gallery, Artists Space and White Columns in New York and LACE in Los Angeles.Norklun, Kathi. "Courage," ''Real Life Magazine'', Summer 1983, p. 19–21. In 1983, she moved to Minneapolis, and joined the faculty at Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1983–8). She eventually attracted wider attention for increasingly politicized work that was influenced by cinema, music and dance, with shows at the Whitney Museum, New Museum, SFMOMA, and Walker Art Center, among others.Bonetti, David. "The Painted Word, ICA hangs a catalogue," ''The Boston Phoenix'', February 12, 1988. She also founded Kulture Klub Collaborative, a project involving artists and homeless teens that bridged creative expression and survival.Ferris, Allison. ''Memorable Histories and Historic Memories'', Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1998.Kulture Klub Collaborative
"About."
Retrieved October 19, 2020.Hudson, Danae. "Partner Post: Kulture Klub Collaborative," ''YouthLink''. October 20, 2016. Retrieved October 19, 2020.

After returning to Los Angeles in 1999, Cypis taught at institutions including USC, CalArts, UCLA, and Otis College of Art and Design until 2018.Otis College of Art and Design
Dorit Cypis
Retrieved October 7, 2020. In 2005, she completed a master's degree in Dispute Resolution (MDR) at Pepperdine University and has since worked as a mediator.John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
Dorit Cypis
Fellows. Retrieved October 6, 2020.

Early performance, mixed-media artwork and social practice

Critics aligned the strategies of Cypis's early work (e.g., ''In Quest of the Impresario: Courage'', 1982) with feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger and Dara Birnbaum, who sought to unmask and disrupt patriarchal systems of viewing and representation.Linker, Kat
"Eluding Definition,"
''Artforum'', December 1984, p. 61–7. Retrieved October 5, 2020. By the mid-1980s, however, she moved beyond appropriation and pastiche to a deeper psychophysical engagement with the female body, representation and sexual identity, confronting social conventions with strategies of provocation, defamiliarization and stream-of-conscious association.Heartney, Eleanor. "Art in the 90s: A mixed prognosis," ''New Art Examiner'', May 1990, p. 24–6.Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "Beyond the Simulation Principle," ''Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography'', Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1988.Jones, Amelia. "Intersubject- and Interobject-ivity in Dorit Cypis's Angel of Histories," ''Angel of Histories'', Riverside, CA: University of California, Sweeney Art Gallery, 2000. She integrated photomontage and projection, performance and movement, sound and spectator involvement, often upending the roles of viewer and viewed. Writer Abigail Solomon-Godeau singled out this work as grounded in a "utopianism of the body" that staked out a corporeal reality beyond idealized, repressive representations as a site of self-possession and self-knowledge.

In multi-slide and sound pieces including ''Love After Death'' (1986), Cypis overlaid emotionally and psychologically loaded imagery—erotic photographs, borrowings from media, medicine, religion and Renaissance painting, haunting family snapshots, exotic travel slides—to create phantasmagoric installations that engulfed performers and spectators in a fluctuating tableau of audio and visual stimuli.Riddle, Mason
"Dorit Cypis,"
''Artforum'', March 1987, p. 135–6. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Jardine, Alice. "Alice in Wonderland Looking/For The Body," ''Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography'', Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1988.Domandi, Mary-Charlotte. "Dorit Cypis: Singing the Body Electric," ''Aperture'', Winter 1990, p. 66–70. Rather than re-invoke dominant cultural tropes, her imagery suggested multiple, equivalent meanings, role reversals involving gender and agency, and a concept of "self" extending beyond one's body and lifetime to other generations and the collective unconscious (e.g., ''Lucy and the Vampire''; ''A Sacred Prostitute (one in herself)'', 1990).Joselit, David. "Saying the Unspeakable," ''Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography'', Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1988.

Cypis faced controversy for addressing themes of sexuality during an era of heightened culture-war tensions around art, sexuality, the AIDS crisis, funding and censorship.Muchnic, Suzanne
"NEA and the Arts: The Turmoil Continues; 'Witnesses' Show Presents AIDS as a Complex Issue,"
''Los Angeles Times'', November 16, 1989. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Leo, Vince. "Interview with Dorit Cypis," ''Artpaper'', March 1990.Reid, Calvin. "Beyond Mourning," ''Art in America'', April 1990, p. 51–6. Her installation ''X-Rayed'' (1988, Whitney Museum) incorporated sound, performance and more than 300 images—one-third depicting a naked woman exploring her body through looking at book images and at herself. Challenging stereotypes, it explored both empowerment—whether a woman can possess her body while being looked at—and thorny, socially conditioned feelings of shame, guilt and repulsion; such feelings extended to the work's subject, who reacted publicly and threatened litigation to block its future presentation. A year later, Cypis produced ''X-Rayed, (altered)'', replicating the original images by substituting her own naked body for the model's. ''Artweeks Tony Reveaux described its choreography of imagery and gazes (of Cypis, the camera, and viewer) as "a beguiling and unnerving walk-through cubist self-portrait of sexual recognition and identity."

In subsequent exhibitions, Cypis broadened her examinations of identity, drawing comparisons to Carolee Schneemann and Cindy Sherman.Randolph, Karen M. "Dorit Cypis," ''New Art Examiner'', January 1995, p. 60–1. With ''Yield (the body)'' (1989), she played with traditional, gendered notions of artist and model (and portrait and self-portrait), inviting four female photographers including Nan Goldin to photograph her unclothed in order to consider if how women look at a woman's body is informed by the male gaze.Russell, John
"Statements of Grief and Survival in Show that Confronts AIDS"
''The New York Times'', November 16, 1989, p. C23. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Curtis, Cathy

''Los Angeles Times'', June 2, 1989. Retrieved October 6, 2020. In the performance ''The Inquisition'' (1991), Cypis further questioned the cultural construction and distortion of sexuality by appearing in the role of "the inquisitor" questioning Miss Jones from the 1972 video ''The Devil in Miss Jones''.Steele, Mike. "Three Plays Grapple with Women's Questions," ''Star Tribune'', January 1991. For ''The Body in the Picture'' (1993), Cypis photographed participants physically interacting with projected autobiographical and media images that they chose; ''The Boston Globe'' deemed them "psychophotos—the capturing of the mind on emulsion."Grossfeld, Stan. "Haunting, powerful photographs at the Gardner Museum," ''The Boston Globe'', September , 1993.Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Dorit Cypis
Artists. Retrieved October 6, 2020.

Later art, mediation and social practice

Cypis's later efforts, informed by her work with Kulture Klub Collaborative, turned from the gendered body to broader conceptions invoking history, memory, space and geopolitics. ''Framing Memories I Never Had'' (1998) interwove images of catastrophe (e.g., the Holocaust) and poetic intimacy in a cinema-like slideshow of overlapping frames, double projections and white-out dissolves.Miller, Marcus. "Being in Pictures: Dorit Cypis' film threat," ''Hour'', October 22, 1998.Leo, Vince. "Making Histories," ''Angel of Histories'', Riverside, CA: University of California, Sweeney Art Gallery, 2000. Other works used recurrent elements—mirrors and tactile, highly associative materials like feathers, raw sheep fleece and plywood—to create visually disorienting, ambiguous spaces and engage the body on social, psychological and phenomenological levels.Briggs, Patricia
"Sculpture on Site,"
''Artforum'', November 1998. Retrieved October 5, 2020. The installations ''Out of Time'' (1998–2000) and ''Angel of Histories'' (2000) explored movement, ephemerality, mortality and human form, reproducing spectators' reflections through distorting mirrors, video feeds and scales that placed them both inside and outside the work.

In her early-2000s photography, Cypis investigated social and interior space, often using mirrors to disorient and collapse the distance between viewer and subject.Knight, Christopher

''Los Angeles Times'', September 24, 2003. Retrieved October 7, 2020. The ''Prisoner's Dilemma'' series examined disempowerment in situations of limited knowledge (its title referencing the well-known game theory/negotiation scenario); the images depict Cypis staring into a one-way mirror from inside the temporary jail of a California court, with reflective surfaces and architectural disruptions creating a dislocating, panopticon-like environment. In her ''The Rest in Motion'' photographs and video, Cypis suggests human presence and psychic states through absence, relying on the sensual qualities of a windblown, billowing curtain in an oceanside window whose rhythmic push and pull evokes breath, restlessness, and freedom.Viegener, Matias. "The Region of Unlikeness," ''X-Tra'', Spring 2008, p. 40–4.Ollman, Leah
"Five engaging video teasers,"
''Los Angeles Times'', August 10, 2007. Retrieved October 7, 2020.Wagley, Catherine
"Dress Attractively or Dress to Attract,"
''Daily Serving'', August 10, 2012. Retrieved October 7, 2020.

Cypis turned to installations based on news images in the mid-2000s, which she recontextualized or recombined to yield new narratives.Spampinato, Denise. ''Parallel Visions'', Los Angeles: Mandarin, 2005. ''Liberty (leading the people)'' (2003) re-presents an altered image of male youth in Gaza fleeing tear gas, which is reflected (thus altered again) in a same-sized floor mirror. ''Stranded Subject (weekends)'' (2007) presented a series of dystopic images with a chronological timeline running beneath across gallery walls that referenced their original contexts and captions. In ''Sightlines'' (2006, LACMA), Cypis staged a dialogue of displaced looks using mirrors and photographs of sculptural likenesses she commissioned from a forensic scientist also working on the case of missing girls in Juarez, Mexico; the likenesses depict two women Cypis saw on a ''Newsweek'' cover, a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli resembling one another who were both killed when the Palestinian detonated herself.Ollman, Leah

''Los Angeles Times'', September 4, 2006. Retrieved October 7, 2020.Joselit, David
"Public Image Ltd.,"
''Artforum'', September 2006. Retrieved October 5, 2020.Kuo, Michelle
"Consider This,"
''Artforum'', June 7, 2006. Retrieved October 5, 2020. ''Artforum'' critic David Joselit called it an "astute allegory of contemporary media (and politics) hatdemonstrates that the production of images may be an index of civic blockage rather than of social connection."

Cypis has since delved further into personal identity in relation to history, politics and society.Popp, Nancy. "LA Studio Visit: Dorit Cypis," ''Artillery'', November 2011.Knight, Christopher
"Art review: 'Supernatural' @ Jancar Gallery,"
''Los Angeles Times'', August 10, 2010. Retrieved October 7, 2020. The installation ''Foreign Exchanges: Galileo'' (2008) featured an image of a dark-skinned man peering through a telescope—Cypis's "Galileo"—facing clusters (like cells or galaxies) of mirrors and circular cropped photographs that he chose to represent him; the configuration implied a more nuanced, multi-perspective understanding of memory, myth and history in a balkanized era.Mizota, Sharon

''Los Angeles Times'', October 10, 2008. Retrieved October 7, 2020. In the exhibitions ''FabLab—The Artist and Her Archive'' (2010), ''A Symmetry'' (2011) and ''The Life of Life'' (2012), Cypis explored her own identity and family history through objects, snapshots, documents and text from her own and her family archives, including a timeline display, magician performance, and deck of playing cards.Dorit Cypis website
Projects
Retrieved October 7, 2020. ''The Sighted See the Surface'' (2012–9)—a video installation, book, and body of subtle text prints that began as a memorial to mentor Michael Asher—weaves experiences over forty years, including 1970s Asher artwork, volunteer work at the Braille Institute for the Blind, and community-conflict dialogue facilitation.LM Projects
"Dorit Cypis, The Sighted See the Surface, Special Edition Publication,"
Projects. Retrieved October 9, 2020.

Mediation and educational work

Cypis's mediation work grew out of her artistic focus on identity, social relations, and increasingly, social justice.Herbst, Marc

''Journal of Aesthetics & Protest'', Issue 6. Retrieved October 23, 2020. After earning her Dispute Resolution (MDR) master's degree, she founded ''Foreign Exchanges'' in 2006, an initiative that offered strategies to bridge personal and cultural differences by combining aesthetics, conflict resolution and somatic arts.Transart Institute
Dorit Cypis
People. Retrieved October 9, 2020. In 2008, she became a founding member of ''Mediators Beyond Borders'' and served as chair of the organization's Middle East Initiative; her work there included a 2009 mediation visit to the Israeli village Neve Shalom–Wahat al-Salam following the Gaza War, in which she used sensorial walks to build trust.''Mediators Beyond Borders''. Retrieved October 19, 2020.

Cypis has developed several public programs in Los Angeles, many involving communities and law enforcement. In 2014, after partnering with the Los Angeles Department of Human Relations to gain understanding of chronic community conflict, she co-founded ''North East Youth Council'' (NEYC) to build leadership skills for at-risk-youth, develop community projects, and improve relations with police. She has partnered with ''Days of Dialogue – The Future of Policing'' since 2015 as dialogue facilitator and has designed numerous forums on race and identity.''Days of Dialogue – The Future of Policing''. Retrieved October 19, 2020. In 2018, Cypis founded the platform ''PeoplesLab – transforming conflict into possibility'', which employs somatic, perceptual, psychological and procedural communication skills-training to engage conflict and develop capacity for creative social-justice change. She presented ''One Another'', an interactive presentation exploring strategies for intimate engagement across difference, in 2019 at NAVEL in Los Angeles.NAVEL LA
"Friendly Fire (a coronation)"
Retrieved October 23, 2020.

In addition to teaching courses on identity, social relations and conflict transformation at higher learning institutions, Cypis has contributed essays on art and mediation to books (''The Mediation Handbook: Research, Theory, and Practice'', 2017),Georgakopoulos, Alexia
''The Mediation Handbook: Research, Theory, and Practice''
New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017. Retrieved October 9, 2020. journals (''Association for Conflict Resolution Magazine'', ''East of Borneo''),Cypis, Dorit with Rook Campbell
"Flip, Flop, Foul and Reconciliation: Which Beautiful Game? (Parts 1 & 2),"
''East of Borneo'', 2014. Retrieved October 9, 2020.Cypis, Dorit
"Performing Empathy: What the Arts Can Offer Conflict Resolution,"
''Association for Conflict Resolution Magazine'', Winter 2014. Retrieved October 9, 2020. and institutions including the Walker Art Center.Cypis, Dorit
"Art Reminds Us We Are Implicated in Each Other's Lives,"
''Soundboard'', Walker Art Center, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2020.Stromberg, Matt
"Performance Scores and Instructions for the Midterm Elections,"
''Hyperallergic'', October 31, 2018. Retrieved October 9, 2020.

Recognition and collections

In 2014, Cypis was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, and an SPArt Award for artists in the field of social practice. She has received multiple awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, McKnight Foundation and Jerome Foundation, and single awards from the Japan Foundation, Bush Foundation, Durfee Foundation, City of Los Angeles, Fellows of Contemporary Art, and American Jewish University.American Jewish University
"WORD 2018-2019: The Bruce Geller Memorial Prize,"
Word Grant 2018 – 2019. Retrieved October 5, 2020.

Cypis's work belongs to the public collections of the International Center of Photography, National Gallery of Canada, Fonds régional d'art contemporain (FRAC) in France, Walker Art Center, Center for Creative Photography, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Orange County Museum of Art, among others.Walker Art Center
Aya Dorit Cypis (Dorit Cypis)
Collections. Retrieved October 7, 2020.Center for Creative Photography
Dorit Cypis
Artists. Retrieved October 7, 2020.

References

External links

Dorit Cypis
official website
PeoplesLab
official website
Dorit Cypis
Guggenheim fellowship

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cypis, Dorit
1951 births
Living people
American installation artists
Israeli emigrants to the United States
Israeli artists
Israeli Jews
Jewish American artists
Feminist artists
American video artists
California Institute of the Arts alumni
Sir George Williams University alumni
21st-century American Jews