Ericka Beckman

Ericka Beckman is an American contemporary visual artist and filmmaker. She came to prominence in the 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation, a group of American conceptual artists who appropriated popular culture imagery for the purpose of cultural critique. Beckman's practice has focused on the potential for cultural transformation and individual agency through the exposition and subversion of dominant ideologies in media. Her film and video works adopt game and fairytale tropes as structuring device, employing hand-made sets that suggest playing fields together with protagonists (or "players"), whose rule-based actions are choreographed to the rhythms of musical scores and incantations. Now considered prescient, her work has marked the rising influence and effects of video gaming and digital image-production on psychological development and social life. In a review of Beckman's first US retrospective, Margaret Carrigan wrote, "Beckman has centered her video work on the visual language of games, fairytales, and folklore. While these might be sources of childhood fun, Beckman is not playing around: her dark, techno-futuristic films and installations use these tropes to question role-play, gender and identity, as well as issues surrounding late-capitalist systems of power and control." Beckman's work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, Whitney Museum, The Broad, and Walker Art Center, among others. She has exhibited or screened work at those institutions, as well as at Mumok (Vienna), Tate Modern, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), and Drawing Center. Beckman lives and works in New York City and is a professor emeritus of film and video at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.