Vanessa Beecroft (born April 25, 1969) is an Italian-born American contemporary performance artist; she also works with photography, video art, sculpture, and painting. Many of her works have made use of professional models, sometimes in large numbers and sometimes naked or nearly so, to stage tableaux vivants. She works in the United States, and is based in Los Angeles. Her early work was focused on gender and appeared to be autobiographical; her later work is focused on race. Starting in 2008 she began working with Kanye West on collaborations and commercial projects.

Early life and education

Vanessa Beecroft was born April 25, 1969, in Genoa, Italy and raised in Santa Margherita Ligure and Malcesine near Lake Garda. Both of her parents were teachers; she was born to an Italian mother, Maria Luisa and a British father, Andrew Beecroft. After she was born, her family briefly moved to Holland Park, west London. Her parents divorced when she was three years old and she did not see her father or her younger brother again until she was 15 years old. Her mother raised Beecroft alone in a village in Italy in a strict vegan household with no cars, no television, and no phone. In childhood, she was hospitalized for overeating specific foods she thought would cleanse her system, and she struggled with an eating disorder. From 1988 to 1993 she attended Brera Academy in Milan, Italy. Her first art exhibition VB01 (1993) was in a gallery in Milan and featured a performance with other female students from Brera Academy wearing Beecroft's clothing, and sharing Beecroft's "Book of Food", a diary documenting her food consumption from 1985 and 1993. The "Book of Food" documented Beecroft's bulimic eating habits and was referenced again in her later work, but it was separate from the performances. She moved to the United States in 1996, at the invitation of art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, settling in New York City.

Art

Some common themes in the work include self discipline (of the models), voyeurism, and power relationships. Beecroft's artwork is often performance or installation-based with live human figures, but she also documents the performances with photography and video; this work is in many public museum and art collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Van Abbemuseum, amongst others.

VB performances (1993–present)

Many of the VB performances were documented in the Dave Hickey book VB 08-36: Vanessa Beecroft Performances (2000), and in Emily L. Newman's book Female Body Image in Contemporary Art: Dieting, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm, and Fatness (2018). The performances were titled sequentially. Strict rules were imposed on the models' behavior during the performances; they were instructed not to engage with the audience. Models were uniformed, nude, or barely clothed and were required to stand for hours, often in tall high heels without movement or eye contact. Beecroft always used tall, thin, young models who she referred to as "girls", regardless of their age. In later work, Beecroft would use designer accessories or shoes as props for the models.

Other work

In October 2005, Beecroft staged a three-hour performance on the occasion of the opening of the Louis Vuitton store, "Espace Louis Vuitton" on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. For the same event, Beecroft placed models both black and white on the shelves next to Louis Vuitton bags in a "human alphabet". In 2007 the Louis Vuitton company apologized to Dutch graphic designer Anthon Beeke for mimicking his "Naked Ladies Alphabet" design without his consent. In 2018, Beecroft and Kim Kardashian collaborated on a series of nude photos of Kardashian that were displayed on social media for the release of Kardashian's perfume, which had a "Kardashian body-shaped bottle".

Collaborations with Kanye West

Since 2008, Beecroft has been collaborating on work with artist Kanye West. They began working together with a listening party at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles for West's music albums 808s and Heartbreaks. In 2010, Beecroft was named creative lead for the Runaway music video. On the Kanye West music tour, the Yeezus Tour (October 2013 – September 2014), Beecroft designed the sets and choreography. Beecroft worked on West's Spike Jonze directed music video for the 2014 song “Only One”. In 2014, Beecroft assembled and built the wedding ceremony of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. In September 2015 she directed Kanye's 808 and Heartbreak show at the Hollywood Bowl. In February 2015, West embarked on a fashion design career with Yeezy Season 1, under the Adidas label and Beecroft directed the performance presentation. Beecroft went on to work on Yeezy Season 2 (September 2015), Yeezy Season 3 (February 2016), and Yeezy Season 4 (September 2016). Beecroft alleged she was a full-time employee for West until 2016, when her role changed and she became a part-time contractor. In 2019, she collaborated with West on two opera-based performances, Nebuchadnezzar and Mary.

Controversies

Her performance work about gender was often critiqued for being a "post-feminist statement about fashion or pandering to a corrupted way of seeing". Photographer Collier Schorr noted, "Beecroft is interested in the aesthetics of how women look when they are looked at, and her body-conscious projects encourage alienation between model, artist, and audience." Beecroft's work with live female nude models in performances often uses a specific type of model, one with an Westernized "idealization" of the female body, all of the models appearing uniformly thin, tall, and young. These choices have been criticized as harmful, distorted, and conforming to gender stereotypes. Beecroft has been quoted in an interview in 2016, “I have divided my personality. There is Vanessa Beecroft as a European white female, and then there is Vanessa Beecroft as Kanye, an African-American male.” Her later work deals with race, and she has made a series of racially insensitive remarks in interviews. Beecroft’s failed attempt to adopt Sudanese twins was the topic of the documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins (2008) by Pietra Brettkelly, which was included in the Sundance Film Festival's World Cinema Documentary Competition. The film presents Beecroft as a "hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist" and chronicles her "damaging quotes and appalling behavior" as she attempts to adopt the orphans for use in an art exhibit.

Personal life

Vanessa Beecroft was previously married to marketer Greg Durkin. They lived in Cold Spring Harbor, New York together for many years. The marriage ended in divorce. Durkin and Beecroft had two sons together (born in 2001 and 2004). Later, she married photographer Federico Spadoni. Beecroft and Spadoni have one daughter and one son together (born 2009 and 2012).

Biography

Exhibition catalogues

A select list of exhibition catalogues by Beecroft, listed in ascending order by publication year.