Michael Lent is a British–American visual artist, academic, curator and researcher. He studied at Tyler School of Art of Temple University where he received a BFA, and earned his MFA at Goddard College supervised by sound artist Andrea Parkins, and his PhD at the University of Lincoln.

Visual art

Michael Lent utilises drawing, installation, text, and video in his visual art, His work has been described as: "a daring blend of text, sound and image", in the journal TriQuarterly, which summarized his approach with:

:"Lent calls our attention to the construction of the work itself and engages us not just in concerns of the historical world but in the difficulty of representing the experience of it."

Lent has exhibited internationally, including at Bluecoat in Liverpool, MASS MoCA in Massachusetts, and Albright–Knox Art Gallery in New York City. He has also been the recipient of various awards, including funding from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He asserts that the way we approach and experience the world, in fact leads “to a spatial disappearance into place.” In both his research and visual practice, Lent attempts to court this dissolution as an attempt to “uncover and produce an imagining of space” In Lent’s book Courting Dissolution, he examines what role art has in colonization and subsequent dissolution. In the London School of Economics Book Review it was characterised as taking “up the problem of space and spatiality as it emerges in the context of a world defined by globalisation and capitalist over-production,” and observed it “brings together an astute and astonishing array of theoretical sources to make sense of a world increasingly defined by globalisation and capitalist over-production.”

Projects and curation

Lent was the creator and publisher of Toby Room, a journal that featured interviews and original work by contemporary artists and writers. In 2002, he and fellow artist Jared Pappas-Kelley created the arts organization ArtRod, which encompassed both the public media Tollbooth Gallery project as well as Critical Line art centre, which has since been reimagined as an online project.

  • Website for ArtRod
  • Lent on UK art database Axis

References