Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.

Trevor Paglin was born in 1974 in Camp Springs, Maryland. He received his BA from U.C. Berkeley, an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Geography from U.C. Berkeley. He has had one-person exhibitions at Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Vienna Secession; Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University; Van Abbe Museum, Netherlands; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; and Protocinema Istanbul. He has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, Vice Magazine, the New Yorker, and Art Forum. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for his work as a “groundbreaking investigative artist.”

Work in the Exhibition:

Trevor Paglen, Behold these Glorious Times! 2017. Single channel color video projection, stereo. TRT: 10 minutes. Original Score: Holly Herndon. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.