Rita Lintz

Geographical and temporal dispersion and diversity of genres of Rita Lintz’s work—photographs, objects, installations, and performances—presented in New York, Italy, and Germany show a coherence of motifs and a sustained innovative drive, with a passion for the liminal.

Rita Lintz belongs to a rare brand of artist for whom intellectual studies and artistic efforts stand on equal footing and, indeed, complement each other. As a literary theorist, she has experimented with the “body as text” approach in her academic writings on Melville’s Moby Dick and Dante’s Divine Comedy. As an artist, using thread and industrial rag bales, she makes connections between text and textile; between body and writing; between persons, places, and things—inscribed, scratched, branded.

Explicit in Rita Lintz’s on-site installations and performances is a response to the architectural and historical space. In the ancient cattle market in Reggio Emilia, Italy, using thread, rag bales, printed patterns, and text, she showed the red cow of Reggio Emilia, juxtaposing it with the history of the cow in the American landscape. In Prato, Italy, a textile-producing city, she demonstrated to the textile dealers that their industrial bale of rags is an object of beauty, worthy of contemplation. In Islip, Long Island, in a house-turned museum, she floated bedclothes through the windows onto the garden. In Manhattan, in the passageway of a building between 42nd and 43rd Streets, she placed industrial bales of old clothes which were on their way to becoming recycled new cloth. Performing with her own theatre group in the art estate Villa di Celle in Pistoia, Italy, she and her actors re-present Chagall’s “Introduction to the Yiddish Theater.” Chagall’s figure of an acrobat entwined in ritual phylacteries attempts to defend himself. One critic argues that the acrobat is a hilarious figure, the other claims he is not.

This bio/description was originally published in 2001 and updated in 2013. For more current information, please refer to the award recipient's website (if provided).