Keith Sonnier

An early proponent of Postminimalism who did pioneering work in video, performance, and light art, Keith Sonnier was a uniquely protean artist. He rose to prominence in the late 1960s, imbuing his practice with the daring, experimental spirit of this moment. Spanning six decades as well as a wide range of media, his highly idiosyncratic oeuvre resists easy categorization, revealing through its twists and turns Sonnier’s unbridled curiosity and imagination. His lifelong sensitivity to unconventional materials—from industrial neon to ephemeral, high-tech radio waves and tactile, soft elements, such as flocked latex and foam rubber—impelled him to reenvision sculpture as a capacious medium, marked by heterogeneity, juxtaposition, and a sensuality surpassing the merely optical.

Born in Mamou, Louisiana in 1941, Sonnier grew up in a close-knit Cajun community, defined by an eclectic mix of African, French, and English cultural traditions. The marshy landscape of southern Louisiana, where fog and still bodies of water regularly refract light to sublime effect, long gripped him. Begun in 1969, his floor-to-wall Ba-O-Ba series, for instance, offers perfectly equipoised compositions of geometric glass panes set aglow by colored neon lights, whose reflections and spatial diffusion of color enlist the viewer in a phenomenological experience true to the eldritch ambience of the bayou, specifically, to “the effect of moonlight on the skin” referenced by the series’ Creole title. Sonnier spent much time as a child watching the films played at the local movie house run by his aunt—a pastime that foreshadowed his later experimentation with novel, time-based technologies, including video and satellite transmission. Additionally, his father’s hardware store, as well as his mother’s occupation as a florist, early on awakened him to a broad universe of materials, one free of biases against the decorative, industrial, or everyday.

With the support of his family, Sonnier began his studies in figurative painting in 1959 while attending the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1963, he traveled to Normandy and Paris, where he was drawn to Henri Matisse’s experiments with color and form. While visiting the Musée d’Art Moderne, he was struck by Oracle (1962–65), an assemblage by Robert Rauschenberg, a fellow Gulf Coast native whose predilection for unvarnished, haptic materials resonated profoundly with Sonnier. Indeed, Oracle’s juxtaposition of found objects and electronics, including a car door, ventilation duct, and multiple radios, radically expanded Sonnier’s understanding of sculpture. In 1966, a year after returning to the US, Sonnier began pursuing an MFA under Robert Morris and Robert Watts at Rutgers University, whose impressive faculty included other eminent figures—Roy Lichtenstein, Allan Kaprow, and George Segal, among them. The school had, in addition, shaped influential figures, notably Lucas Samaras, and was visited by key artists, such as Yoko Ono and George Brecht, during Sonnier’s time there. It was also while at Rutgers that Sonnier met his first wife, the Newfoundland-born sculptor Jackie Winsor.

Sonnier received his first solo exhibition at an international museum in 1970 at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. It was followed just a year later by his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Projects: Keith Sonnier, held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. By this time, Sonnier had already become one of the first artists to experiment with new forms of media such as video projection, integrating these with improvised performances. He further explored performance in the Projects exhibition, producing participatory light and sound environments that actively engaged the viewer as yet another component of the work. His interest in live-broadcast and surveillance technology evolved into multimedia performance works, such as Send/Receive/Send (1973) held at The Kitchen, New York, and Send/Receive Satellite Network: Phase I & II (1977), the latter of which used NASA telecommunication systems to establish a live satellite feed between groups of artists in San Francisco and New York. Pointing to the machinations of the mass media, the artist retroactively explained that there was a “political thrust” to his cooptation of such a communication network, which undercut its propagandistic nature by “making that tool culturally possible” or available to artistic expression.

Among his numerous awards and honors, Sonnier was presented with the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1974, the same year he was awarded first prize at the International Biennial Exhibition of Prints, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. He has twice been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Washington, D.C. (1975, 1981), and was presented with the Arts and Letters Award in Art by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2013). In 2014, Sonnier was honored with a SPARK Lifetime Achievement Award, conferred by the University of Louisiana, Lafayette (2014).