Cecelia Condit
Cecelia Condit (born 1947, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American artist working in video. A storyteller producing videos since 1981, her work swings between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty. In the psychological landscape of contemporary fairy tales, Condit's films put a subversive spin on the traditional mythologies of female representation and the psychologies of sexuality and violence. Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, her work focuses on myths of old age, childhood, lovers, mothers, families, friends.
Over the past 30 years, Condit has been the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, Mary L. Nohl Foundation, Wisconsin Arts Council and National Media Award from the Retirement Research Foundation. Her work has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. In 2008, Condit had her first solo show exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation in New York.[1]
She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, received a B.F.A. in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art and M.F.A. in photography from Tyler School of Art of Temple University. She served as professor and director of the graduate program in the Department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, before retiring in 2017.[2]
Condit's work has been widely popular among youth and young adults, beginning with the viral success of her film "Possibly in Michigan" on Reddit in 2015.[3] Four years later, an audio clip from the same film became a viral hit on Tiktok, with over 22,000 iterations created as of July 2019.[4]
Her videos are available from the Video Data Bank, Chicago, and Electronic Arts Intermix, NYC.
Videography
Beneath the Skin 1981
Possibly in Michigan 1983
Not a Jealous Bone 1987
Suburbs of Eden 1992
Oh, Rapunzel 1996
Why Not a Sparrow 2003
All About a Girl 2004
Little Spirits 2005
Annie Lloyd 2008
First Dream After Mother Died 2010
Within a Stone’s Throw 2012
Pulling Up Roots 2015
Some Dark Place 2016
Pizzly Bear 2017
We Were Hardly More Than Children 2018
I've Been Afraid 2020
Family
Condit has two grown sons, Schuyler Vogel and Lloyd Vogel.
References
- University of Wisconsin faculty profile
- Tamblyn, Christine. “Significant Others: Social Documentary as Personal Portraiture in Women’s Video of the 1980’s.”
- Mellencamp, Patricia, “Uncanny Feminism: The Exquisite Corpses of Cecelia Condit”, Framework, vol. 32, no. 3:104-22.
- Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer's “Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art.”