Harriet Casdin-Silver
On March 9, 2008 Harriet Casdin-Silver died following a short, intense bout with pneumonia. Informed of the damage to her system and the likelihood that she could not function independently, the 83-year old artist asked her family to let her go.
The international doyenne of holography, Casdin-Silver is widely acknowledged as the most important artist in the history of the medium. Since 1968, she was a pioneer figure, working at labs in university and corporate settings in the United States, Belgium, England, Germany and Russia, and in her Boston studio. She was responsible for technical innovations during the medium's infancy in the 1960s and for the introduction of provocative subject matter throughout the ensuing decades. Her vigorous feminism informed her work, the focus of which is the human form as a site of psychological, sexual, and spiritual energy.
In recent years she focused on commissioned holographic portraits. Her most recent work is a series of large and very large-scale digital print portraits - female nudes presenting art historians, athletic young women, and the artist herself at 81. The works glory in the physical forms of their female subjects, in the ability of their bodies to express spirit, and in the varieties of color and mood Casdin-Silver derives from her studio setting and her Fort Point neighborhood looming through her windows.
Among other venues in over 12 countries, Casdin-Silver's work has been the subject of three solo exhibitions at the Museum of Holography in New York and included in Boston (in dialogue) Now at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In 1998, forty years' work was presented in a major retrospective at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. In 2005 the Bates Museum of Art presented The Body Holographic: Harriet Casdin-Silver.
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“Ms. Casdin-Silver came to holography in the late 1960's almost by accident, while searching for more efficient ways to light the multimedia environments she was creating. Experimentation with lasers led to a stint at the American Optical Corporation, where she was invited to try her hand at the new medium of holography. When she came to American Optical, she had no technical expertise -- ''I couldn't tell a nail from a screw,'' she claims.
But that ignorance turned out to be a blessing . . .”
- Miles Unger, New York Times
