Jill
Magid
FACE #22
Artist
What was your path/journey after you graduated from Cornell?
After graduating, I moved to NYC with fellow alumna Andrea Berloff, and rented an art studio. In 2000, I earned a Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT. There, I developed projects in which I incorporated - and hacked into - surveillance systems. After graduating, I was accepted to the Rijksakademie, an international art residency program in Amsterdam, where I lived for five years. My career began by exhibiting work in Europe.
My work is deeply ingrained in my lived experience, where I explore and blur the boundaries between art and life. Over the last 25 years, I have trained as a spy, a police officer, and as a journalist to be embedded in Afghanistan. I have starred in films made on police CCTV, been hired by police to bedazzle their surveillance cameras, exhumed an artist’s remains in order to question the corporate control of his body of work, and will become a diamond to be owned by a collector when I die. I use my projects to work through the emotional, philosophical, and legal relationships between "protective" institutions and conventions, and individual identity. I see power as a set of relationships that I can enter in a meaningful way. Gaining access takes research, time, trust, and a series of unorthodox requests, requiring constant negotiation. From the inside, I engage power systems in a progressively personal dialogue, from which I can interrogate them. I believe empathy does not preclude criticality. My work opens up seemingly closed structures. From here I am able to raise questions and concerns on how we live in relation to them.
I have had solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Berkeley Museum of Art, California; Tate Liverpool; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; Gagosian Gallery. I have received awards from the Fulbright Grant, the 2017 Calder Prize, a 2020 Creative Time Artist Commission, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2021 Via Art Fund Grant. I am an adjunct teacher at Cooper Union. My first feature film, The Proposal, premiered at Tribeca Film Festival 2018, and was released in theaters across the US. My work is included in the collections of the Centre Pompidou. The Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jumex, the Walker Art Center, among others.
I live in NYC with my husband and two sons, one of whom is applying to Cornell next fall.
What WAS your favorite Class at Cornell? In retrospect, what has proven to be your most useful class from Cornell?
The class I return to and cite most often was taught in the Anthropology Department by Elizabeth Povinelli on Power. It was a graduate level course that I had to weasel my way into, which thankfully worked. In 2017 I was excited for Elizabeth to write an essay on my work The Barragán Archives for my book called The Proposal, published by Sternberg Press.
What is your favorite memory from your time at Cornell?
Working late nights, or all night, in the sculpture building behind Tjaden Hall with fellow Sculpture alumna Sarah Trigg, welding steel sculptures, conducting (I now realize somewhat dangerous) patination experiments on bronze pieces we had casted using chemicals signed out from the Department of Chemistry, punctured by late-night breaks at the 24-hour Short Stop near downtown Ithaca, where we would fill large cups of frozen yogurt replete with sugary toppings.
Which Cornell classmates do you keep in contact with?
I am very close with Andrea Berloff, who was a theater major at Cornell and my roommate in New York, and is now a very well-known screenwriter and director in Hollywood - as well as her husband, alumnus Drew Filus. Olivia Booth, another fellow art major, and her husband Jesse Wigutow, also an alum and screenwriter in LA. Jesse and I studied abroad in Italy through the Cornell program, along with Jessica Rose, a lawyer based in Brooklyn, who I also remain close with, and has represented me on some of my recent artworks.