AA Bronson’s work—as an artist, healer, curator, and educator—is dominated by the practice of collaboration and consensus. In the 1960s, he left university with a group of friends to found a free school, a commune, and an underground newspaper. This led him into an adventure with gestalt therapy, radical education, and independent publishing. In 1969 he formed the artists’ group General Idea with Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal and for the next 25 years they lived and worked together to produce the living artwork of their being together, undertaking over 100 solo exhibitions, and countless group shows and temporary public art projects. They were known for their magazine FILE (1972-1989), their unrelenting production of low-cost multiples, and their early involvement in punk, queer theory, AIDS activism, and other manifestations of the other.

Since his partners died in 1994, Bronson has worked and exhibited as a solo artist, often collaborating with younger generations, most recently in his performance series Invocation of the Queer Spirits. Since 1999 he has worked as a healer, an identity that he has also incorporated into his artwork–in 2009 he founded the Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. From 2004 to 2010 he was the Director of Printed Matter, Inc, founding the annual NY Art Book Fair in 2005. Throughout all these endeavors his focus has been on the politics of decision-making and on living life radically as social sculpture.

He has had solo exhibitions at  the List Visual Arts Center at MIT in Cambridge, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Secession in Vienna, among other venues. His work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, New York’s Jewish Museum, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Artists Space in New York.

Courtesy of the artist