At the time of her passing in June of this year Jacki Apple, then 80, was one of this country’s most accomplished, prolific and versatile artists, an art critic, script writer and educator. Born and raised in New York City, she was based in Los Angeles since the early 1980s. In a career that spanned more than five decades she began with fashion design, then becoming the founding Curator of Exhibitions at the Franklin Furnace. She was a pioneer feminist performance artist, and expanded into the whole spectrum of interdisciplinary and multi-media visual, audio, and written expression.
An Eco-Feminist, conceptual and experimental, Jacki Apple collaborated with many leading artists and would focus on items as small as micro-artist books to major site-specific installations. Throughout her work she showed little interest in labels like gender and race but looked beyond to intrinsic qualities, to human worth. She focused on issues of cultural disappearance and the meaning of ruins, to global issues - climate change, ecological crises, species extinction, and to the universal - space travel and even dancing in space.
Paralleling her creative output, she taught art, politics and modern society at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, and received one of the profession’s highest awards. She produced and hosted art programs for public radio for fifteen years, and co-directed EarJam, a festival of new music. In later years she authored an award-winning art catalogue of the work of a noted Japanese artist, and distilled the best of her prolific career as an art critic into the landmark book “Performance/Media/Art/Culture Selected Essays 1983-2018”. She was both exacting and generous with others and treated herself no differently - her last book is posthumous, a retro-perspective on her earliest and deeply personal major multi-media work: “The Mexican Tapes Redux”. It is scheduled for release in 2023
