Joe Scanlan

Joe Scanlan is an artist whose work takes multiple forms, from sculpture and design to publications and fictional personae. Indeed, there is a willful subterfuge running through much of his work, as exemplified in works that address the political economy of site-specific labor or co-scripting the life and work of a fictional artist in collaboration with professional actors or in the design and manufacture of portable architecture that can inhabit the body of a host museum. Scanlan is internationally renowned for the dark humor and conceptual rigor of his work.


His work is in the public collections of K21, Tate Modern, London,  Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Stedelijk Museum Voor Aktuele Kunst, Ghent, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Scanlan is the director of the Program in Visual Arts at Princeton University and the executive editor and co-publisher of Metropolis Books.


Courtesy of Lewis Center for the Arts—Princeton