Bio

Zoe Crosher is an artist whose most recent work conceptually maps and ‘pre-archives’ both L.A. and the troubled notion of the “West”, culminating in a solo exhibition of her Prospecting Palm Fronds work (bronzing fallen palm fronds collected from all around Los Angeles) at the Aspen Art Museum in 2017-2018. Her iterative and multi-faceted projects explore overlooked and forgotten histories, both real and manufactured, and concern the schism of photographic documentary—the interstice between the presumption and promise of truth and what that reality actually is. Crosher’s practice engages with this confusion, questioning the assumption of ‘The Real’, often collapsing and confusing fiction and reality. Performing the archive with a particular conceptual and readymade aesthetic and playing with misinformation, mis-captioning, rephotography, transience, and misremembering, she often blurs reality, image, material and disappearance, primarily in relation to obsolesce and forgotten (mainly female) figures.

Named a “prominent Los Angeles artist” by The New York Times in 2014, Crosher’s work is included in various international, private and museum collections including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Palm Springs Museum, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. In 2012, she took part in MoMA’s New Photography show, and in 2011 she was a recipient of the prestigious “Art Here and Now Award,” awarded by LACMA. From 2013-2015, Crosher collaborated with the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) on The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, a series she initiated of artist-produced billboards and activations that unfolded all along the Interstate 10 Freeway, for which she received the 2015 Smithsonian Ingenuity of the Year Award. Numerous books have been published on her work, including one released in February 2016 by Hesse Press and a four-volume set by Aperture Ideas in 2011-2012. She is the founder of The Fainting Club and a fellow at the Royal Society of the Arts in London, was Associate/Assistant Editor of the journal Afterall, and has taught at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Crosher received an MFA from California Institute of Arts (CalArts) in 2001 and most recently was part of the inaugural Silver Art 2020-2021 Cohort Residency at the World Trade Center in NYC.

Information
Projects
  • The New LA-LIKE
    1. LA-LIKE: Sunlight As Spotlight
    2. LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds
    3. LA-LIKE: Escaped Exotics
    4. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific
    5. LA-LIKE: LA Imaginary As Unlit Lightboxes
    6. LA-LIKE: Fools Gold Dust (Mimic) Paintings
    7. LA-LIKE: Day For Night (or Sunlight As Spotlight)
    8. The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, in conjunction with LAND
    9. LA-LIKE: Mirage
    10. Shangri-LA'd & Expanded Shangri-LA'd
    11. LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center
    12. The Manifest Destiny Billboard Perfume
    13. LA Disappearing Frond-Like
    14. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific, Dessert Concepts & Recipes
    15. For An Evening with Eve Babitz, at the Chateau Marmont
    16. Tear Sheet Posters
    17. LA-LIKE (LOST)
    18. LA-LIKE: LAXART Billboard
    19. The Pools I Shot
    20. LA-LIKE
  • The Michelle duBois Project
    1. The Uniqued Series
    2. The Additive Dust Series
    3. Mae Wested
    4. The Disbanding of Michelle duBois
    5. The Vanishing of Michelle duBois
    6. The Disappearing of Michelle duBois
    7. The Other Disappeared Nurse
    8. Silhouetted
    9. All Her Shadows
    10. Blackened Last Four Days & Nights in Tokyo
    11. Almost the Same
    12. The Unveiling of Michelle duBois
    13. The Unraveling of Michelle duBois
    14. Posed Postcards
    15. Polaroided
    16. The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois
    17. Obfuscated
  • The Santa Cruz Kids
  • Out The Window (LAX)
  • The Fainting Club
    1. The Fainting Club (London)
    2. The Fainting Club (New York)
    3. The Fainting Club (Los Angeles)
    4. The Fainting Club (More Cities)
    5. The Fainting Club (About)
  • –
  • Publications
    1. LA-LIKE: Escaped Exotics / The Bronzed Blossoms of Madame, published by X Artists' Books
    2. The Good & The Glamorous, A Memoir of Misremembering & The Cold War
    3. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific, Published by Hesse Presse, Los Angeles, CA - Spring 2016 (Sold Out)
    4. Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles (May 2015) Published by Metropolis Books
    5. Forthcoming: The Re-duBois Book
    6. Returning to Berlin / Publication curated by Kim Schoen - Motto, Berlin (August 2013)
    7. Why Art Photography? by Lucy Soutter (2013) Published by Routelage
    8. Volume 4: The Disappearance of Michelle duBois, aka *Mitchi* (Fall 2012) Published by Aperture Ideas
    9. Volume 3: The Unveiling of Michelle duBois, aka *Cricket* (Spring 2012) Published by Aperture Ideas
    10. Volume 2: The Unraveling of Michelle duBois, aka *Alice Johnson* (Fall 2011) Published by Aperture Ideas
    11. Volume 1: The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois, aka *Kathy* (Spring 2011) Published by Aperture Ideas
    12. Out the Window (LAX) with essays by Norman Klein, Pico Iyer, & Julian Meyers (2007)
    13. NTNTNT (2004)
    14. L.A. Now: Volume One, Published by Art Center College of Design, August 2002