Jill Magid b. 1973

Jill Magid was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1973. She received a BFA from Cornell University and an MS in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), Via Art Fund Grant (2021), Creative Time Artist Commission (2020), Calder Prize (2017), and a Netherland-American Foundation Fulbright Grant (2001-2002).

The artist has staged solo exhibitions at major museums across the globe, including Tate Modern, London (2009); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland (2016); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2017); Dia Bridgehampton, New York (2020); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2021); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022), and M Leuven, Belgium (2023), among others. She has participated in major group exhibitions worldwide, including the Liverpool, Lyon, Bucharest, Singapore, Incheon, Gothenburg, and Performa Biennials, as well as Manifesta.

Magid’s first feature documentary, The Proposal (2018), premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and received an Honorable Mention for Best Emerging Filmmaker at Hot Docs in Toronto; the Festival Grand Prix Award at the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Festival, Poland; and the Public Prize at the Architectural Film Festival Lisbon. Examining authorship, copyright, and national heritage through an act of negotiation, the film evolved from the artist’s long-term investigation into the contested archive of Mexican architect Luis Barragán; for the project, Magid transformed Barragán’s exhumed remains into a diamond ring offered in exchange for the archive’s repatriation to Mexico. 

Among Magid’s public artworks is Tender (2020), commissioned by Creative Time. Addressing questions of value, the project consists of 120,000 newly-minted pennies, edge-engraved by the artist and dispersed into the U.S. economy. In 2004, Magid developed a close relationship with local police over 31 days in Liverpool, home of the largest video surveillance system in the UK. Her video work Evidence Locker, presented at the Liverpool Biennial, consists of staged and edited surveillance footage of the artist in the city center. To obtain the footage, she completed bureaucratic request forms as if they were love letters, forming an intimate portrait of the relationship between the artist, the police and the city.

Magid’s work is held in major institutional collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fundación Jumex, Mexico City; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Magasin III Museum of Contemporary Art, Stockholm; Kadist Foundation, Paris, and others.