Dates

• Existence: 1916-2009

Biography

Alice Hutchins was born in 1916, in Van Nuys, California. After studying history and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, she spent the late nineteen-thirties through the forties living in California, Virginia, Michigan, Washington, D.C. and Cairo, Egypt, with her husband and two children. Hutchins and her family settled in France in 1950, two years prior to the appearance in print of Harold Rosenberg's unabashedly anti-formalist celebration of the liberation of American art from the hegemony of School of Paris modernism. She returned to the United States and spent her last years, very active, in Southern California, and died there October 25, 2009.

Hutchins' interactive magnetic assemblages re-describe the spectator's role in the artistic process by inviting the receiver to alter her sculptural elements of ball bearings, screws, nuts, bolts, coils, cubes and cylinders at will. The artist's works and papers are housed under the auspices of Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary arts and provide important evidence about the inter-relationship among participants in the Paris avant-garde of the late 1960s and the New York Fluxus collective. A web site at which a number a number of Hutchins' art works can be viewed is maintained at www.alicehutchins.com (note that the site requires Macromedia Flash Player to view it).

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