Mel Bochner

Biography:

Mel Bochner is an American conceptual artist. Bochner received his BFA in 1962 and honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2005 from the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He lives in New York City.

Starting in the 1960s, he evolved several of the exhibition strategies now taken for granted, including using the walls of the gallery as the subject of the work and using photo documentation of ephemeral and performance works. As Richard Kalina wrote in Art in America in 1996, Bochner was one of the earliest proponents, along with Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman, of photo-documentation work in which the artist "created not so much a sculpture as a two-dimensional work about sculpture."

Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940. In high school, he won early recognition for his talent from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and studied with Joseph Fitzpatrick. He studied art at Carnegie Mellon University and graduated in 1962. After leaving Pittsburgh, he studied philosophy at Northwestern University near Chicago. He moved to New York in 1964 and worked as a guard at The Jewish Museum.[3] In 1966, he was recruited by the influential art critic Dore Ashton to teach art history at the School of Visual Arts in New York.