Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman has forged a signature visual language in film, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child��s play, games, folklore, or fairytales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colors. Throughout her work, Beckman engages with profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power, and control.

Accompanying an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, which will include selected works spanning thirty years of her career, this book contextualizes Beckman��s practice within this major showing of her work��the first to fully survey her contribution in a U.S. museum. With a foreword by Paul C. Ha and new essays by Attilia Fattori Franchini, Henriette Huldisch, and Piper Marshall, Ericka Beckman offers an art historical consideration of Beckman��s early Super-8 Films, as well as a critical look at her ongoing preoccupation with the structures of games, gambling, and capitalism.

Featuring thirty color illustrations, including photo-documentation of Beckman��s works since 1983 and installation views of the List Center exhibition, Ericka Beckman provides new insight into this inventive woman artist.


Henriette Huldisch
Hirmer Books
Paper, 104 pages
8 x 10 Inches
9783777433042