Jennifer & Kevin McCoy
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are media artists who work across software, hardware, painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and the moving image. Early projects of theirs included database sculptures of television clips filtered into categorical frameworks, and diorama-like miniature film sets activated by live cameras and software. The recent projects have focused on the machine-human interface and collaborations.
The McCoys' work has been widely exhibited in the US and internationally at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Film Institute-Southbank in London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The San Jose Museum of Art, The Addison Museum of American Art, The Sundance Film Festival, and at many other venues. Their work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the 21C Museum; and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville.
The McCoys are the recipients of a Creative Capital award in 2003, the Wired Rave Award for Art in 2005, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, and a Headlands Alumni Award in 2014. Their work is represented by Postmasters Gallery in New York. In 2022 Kevin received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for co-developing the technology that eventually became known as the NFT.
GrayWhite Geometry
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's Geometry series marks the artists' most recent cutting-edge foray into human-machine collaborations. Each of the individual works is created by a plotter that has been programmed to make its marks through interpretations of source imagery and more purely algorithmic operations. The works extend the McCoys' interests in automation and the question of what it means to make work that eschews the "hand" of the artist and the intention that this implies. The images that result are authored by the machine as much as the McCoys. Ultimately, the point is not to automate the artist but to understand how certain aspects of artistic activity – even the basic kinetic motions that define drawing and painting, the basic perception and interpretation of visual imagery – are in some sense "automated" and thus open to new modes and methods of collaboration.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2023 “Machine Organic,” Expanded Art, Berlin, Germany
2023 “Land Sea Sky,” Artwrld, online exhibition
2021 “Lincoln2Lincoln,” Fiendish Plots, Lincoln, NE
2021 “Broker/Cleaner” Carson Center for the Arts, Lincoln, NE.
2020 “Paper Mirror,” 601 Artspace, New York, NY
2019 “Public Key/Private Key,” Artport, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
2019 “Cleaner,” Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY.
2018 “Projections: Jennifer and Kevin McCoy,” IFP Film Center, New York, NY.
2018 “Broker,” Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX
2017 “Inhabiting the World We Made,” John Hartell Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
2017 “Broker,” Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
2016 “Broker,” Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY
2015 “Priests of the Temple,” Rowe Art Gallery, Charlotte, NC
2014 “All Exit”, Johansson Projects, Oakland, CA
2014 “Jennifer and Kevin McCoy”, The Electronic Gallery, Salisbury, MD
2013 “Jennifer and Kevin McCoy” 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA
2012 “Twenty One Twelve”, Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY
2012 “Abu Dhabi is Love Forever,” Teaching Gallery, HVCC, Troy, NY
2012 “Northwest Passing,” Project Space, Seattle, WA
2012 “The Index,” EMPAC, Troy, NY
Selected Group Exhibitions and Screenings
2023 “4.5 Billion Years,” Brief Histories, New York, NY
2023 “Chain Reaction,” Feral File, online exhibition
2022 “New Frontiers,” Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT
2021 “Natively Digital,” Sotheby’s, New York, NY
2020 “Pictures Revisited,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
2020 “Fine Art Film Festival,” Venice Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
2019 “Cartooney, The New Media Gallery, Anvil Centre, Vancouver, BC
2019 “TV-GUIDE,” Spring Break Art Fair, New York, NY
2017 “Demo Day,” Kunstraum LLC, Brooklyn, NY
2017 “Net Art Anthology,” Rhizome, The New Museum, New York, NY
2016 “Design and Violence,” The Science Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2016 “Source to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive,” Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
2016 “A Celebration of the Speed Collection,” The Speed Museum, Louisville, KY
2015 “The Scary”, New Media Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
2015 “Your smarter than me. i don’t care.”, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA
2015 “Objects of Wonder,” Beall Art Center, Irvine, CA
2015 “From the Ruins,” curated by Jane Harris, 601 Artspace, New York, NY
2015 “AND,” curated by Jennifer Dalton, 601 Artspace, New York, NY
2015 “Wave/Particle” Ronald Feldman, New York, NY
2015 “The 27th Dimension” Spring/Break, New York, NY
2014 “The Sun That Never Sets,” Spring/Break, New York, NY
2014 “thingworld,” The National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China
2013 “Suddenly, There”, Garis & Hahn, New York, NY
2013 “ParaReal” 601 Artspace, New York, NY
2013 “HEIMsuchung. Uncanny Spaces in Contemporary Aty,” KunstMuseum Bonn, Bonn, Germany
2013 “2112,” Moving Image Contemporary Video Art Fair, New York, NY
2013 “Hors Piste,” Pompidou Center, Paris, France
2013 “The Halflifers,” 400 Gallery, Chicago, IL
2012 “Hors Piste,” Pompidou Center, Paris, France
2012 “art.ware”, Hong Kong Arts Center, Hong Kong
2012 “Common Frequency,” Radiator Gallery, NY 2011
2012 “The Architecture of Fear”, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium
2012 “Mods & Hackers”, The Paul Young Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2012 “Brief Histories”, University of Sharjah, April 2011
2010 “No Customs,”(curatorial project), SamaSpace, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Selected Collections
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX
The Speed Museum, Louisville, KY
The Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI
The Nevada Art Museum, Reno, NV
Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA
Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA
MUDAM Contemporary Art Museum, Luxembourg
Francisco Carolinum, Linz, Austria