Location: Vallejo, CA
Medium: Video, Performance, Installation, Conceptual art
Howard Fried was born on June 14, 1946, in Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Syracuse University from 1964 to 1967 and studied briefly at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Case Western Reserve University before moving west, earning his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1968 and his MFA from the University of California, Davis, in 1970. He has been based in the Bay Area since 1967 and lives and works in Vallejo.
Fried is associated with the first generation of conceptual artists in the San Francisco Bay Area, a circle that also included Terry Fox, Lynn Hershman, David Ireland, Paul Kos, Stephen Laub, and Tom Marioni. He founded the video and performance program at the San Francisco Art Institute, the department later known as New Genres, which became one of the most influential training grounds for time-based art on the West Coast before the school closed in 2022. His work was shown early and often at the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco, and he was given the San Francisco Art Institute’s Adaline Kent Award exhibition at the Walter and McBean Galleries in 1972.
His career has moved between the Bay Area and major international venues. He performed Indian War Dance / Indian Rope Trick at documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, and appeared in the Whitney Biennial in 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1983. Solo presentations followed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1977), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1979), the Everson Museum of Art, the Fort Worth Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1985), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1986). The University Art Museum in Berkeley organized a mid-career survey, Howard Fried: Works from 1969 to 1983, in 1983, and apexart in New York presented Deep Excursions: Early Work of Howard Fried in 1998. More recent exhibitions include Sociopath, 1983 & The Decomposition of My Mother’s Wardrobe, 2014-15 at The Box in Los Angeles and Derelicts at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in 2016. His work is held by SFMOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Fried works in performance, video, film, and sculptural installation, and his pieces are typically built out of elaborate, self-imposed rule systems rather than fixed images. His early work took decision making, conflict, control, predictability, and learning as explicit subjects, often staging a situation in which he or a group of participants had to navigate an impossible or absurd procedure. He has described his operating premise as “every action is a potential mistake,” and the resulting works tend to document a process of negotiation rather than deliver a finished object.
The videos are carefully composed and edited, with close attention to time sequence, camera position, and the spatial and semiotic relationships between people and things. The installations can be large and quasi-architectural, such as the Derelict series (1974-1983), which cycles between scales using a single mundane subject, a coffee cup on a formica table, or Sociopath (1983), a two-tiered sink feeding irrigation pipes that run across the floor and walls of the gallery. Later pieces have turned more personal without loosening the structural logic: The Decomposition of My Mother’s Wardrobe (2014-15) arranges roughly 260 garments from his late mother’s closet by type, a taxonomy that doubles as an elegy.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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