Les Levine

Les Levine
Born 1935 (1935)
Dublin
Nationality American
Education Central School of Arts and Crafts in London
Known for Video art
Awards First prize for sculpture in the 1967 Canadian Sculpture Biennial

Les Levine (born 1935) is a naturalized American Irish artist known as a pioneer of video art and as a post-conceptual artist working with mass communication. In 1967 Levine won first prize for sculpture in the Canadian Sculpture Biennial.[1]

Life and work

A graduate of the Central School of Art and Design in London, Levine first moved to Canada in 1960. He eventually settled in New York City in 1964 and became a resident artist at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1973. Early in his career, Levine introduced the idea of a disposable art and used the nickname Plastic Man.

In 1965, Levine, with Nam June Paik, were among the first artists to buy and use portapaks. Thus he was one of the first artists to try television as a medium for the dissemination of art. He has also used the telephone for this purpose, as well.[2]

Levine has written on art for Arts, The Village Voice, Art in America and the Saturday Review.

He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974 and again in 1980.[3]

Reference material

Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood (pp. 337–344). Beyond Modern Sculpture by Jack Burnham, The Britannica Encyclopedia of American Art Simon Schuster, Art and the Future by Douglass Davis, Science and Technology in the Arts by Stewart Kranz, Innovative Printmaking by Theima P. Newman and On Photography by Susan Sontag.

Footnotes

  1. Les Levine Bio
  2. Art by Telephone
  3. Les Levine Bio

Further reading

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