Michael Rakowitz

MICHAEL RAKOWITZ (b. 1973, New York) is an artist living and working in Chicago. In 1998 he initiated paraSITE, an ongoing project in which the artist custom builds inflatable shelters for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building's heating, ventilation, or air conditioning system. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including DOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Castello di Rivoli, the 16th Biennale of Sydney, the 10th and 14th Istanbul Biennials, Sharjah Biennial 8, Tirana Biennale, National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt, and Transmediale 05. He has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern in London, Lombard Freid Gallery in New York, Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea in Torino, and Kunstraum Innsbruck. His public project, Return, was presented by Creative Time in New York in 2006. 

He is the recipient of a 2012 Tiffany Foundation Award; a 2008 Creative Capital Grant; a Sharjah Biennial Jury Award; a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Architecture and Environmental Structures; the 2003 Dena Foundation Award, the 2002 Design 21 Grand Prix from UNESCO, the 2020 Nasher Prize, and the 2020 Public Art Dialogue Award for Achievement in the Field of Public Art. His work features in major private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Van Abbemuseum, Endhoven, Netherlands; The British Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Kabul National Museum, Afghanistan; and UNESCO, Paris. His solo exhibition, The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one's own was on view at Tate Modern in London in 2010. Rakowitz was commissioned by Creative Time in 2011 for his project, Spoils, a culinary intervention at New York City's Park Avenue restaurant that invited diners to eat off of plates looted from Saddam Hussein's palaces. 

The project culminated in the repatriation of the former Iraqi President's flatware to the Republic of Iraq at the behest of current Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki on December 15, 2011—the date Coalition Forces left Iraq. Enemy Kitchen (2003-ongoing) is a food truck serving Iraqi food to Chicago's hungry public, staffed by veterans of the Iraq War working under Iraqi refugee chefs. His first US museum survey, Backstroke of the West, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in September 2017. He has also been awarded the Fourth Plinth commission in London's Trafalgar Square which was unveiled in 2018. Rakowitz is Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.