African American Performance Art Archive

Clifford Owens is one of the key figures in contemporary Black performance art. He commonly uses photography, text, video, visual performance and community interaction to elicit underlying social dynamics across lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. In 1998, Clifford received a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and in 2000, a MFA at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Later, continuing his theoretical studies in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, 2001, NY. He has exhibited art at P.S.1/MoMA, NY; Queens Museum of Art, NY; List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA, Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Para-Site Art Space, Hong Kong, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC and On Stellar Ray Gallery, NY. As an artist and cultural critic, he has published works in  Performa: New Visual Art Performance, Greater New York Book, and Vibe Magazine. He is also a recipient of numerous residencies and awards, such as Louis Tiffany Comfort Award; Lambent Fellowship for the Arts; NY Foundation for the Arts; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Studio Museum in Harlem and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed a two week residency program, entitled Photographs with an Audience. There, he was interested in the role of photography in the documentation of social relationships. In Photographs with an Audience, Owens used performance as subject matter for his photographic works, leading the audience through a series of prescribed interactions and gestures, while pausing to capture moments on film.  He currently is represented by On Stellar Ray Gallery in New York, marking his first solo exhibition in November 2009. He also has a video still of Text Piece currently on display at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY.  Clifford lives and works in New York City.