Jimmie Durham is an internationally acclaimed artist, writer, and poet of Cherokee descent. His intricate sculptures and installations mimic the attributes of humans and animals, and the ways they make or are made into history. Durham combines discarded objects and fragments of organic matter, transforming them with dazzling colour into startling, anthropomorphic configurations His sculptures, wall-based collages and ersatz ethnographic displays deliver ironic assaults on the colonizing procedures of Western culture and weave a complex thread of puns, poetry and political invective.
Born in Washington, Arkansas, in 1940, Durham attended the University of Texas in Austin and the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Geneva An activist In the American Indian Movement (AIM) during the 1970s, Durham has published books on poetry, fiction, and critical theory. His work has been widely exhibited, with solo presentations at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2015) ; Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2012) ; Portikus, Frankfurt (2010) ; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2009) ; Kunstverein Munich (1998) ; and Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1993).
Durham has also participated in many international group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, New York (1993, 2006 and 2014) ; the Venice Biennale (1999, 2001, 2005 and 2013) ; the Istanbul Biennial (1997 and 2013), Documenta, Kassel (1992 and 2012) ; the Sao Paulo Biennial (2010) ; the Biennale of Sydney (2004), and the Gwangju Biennale (1997 and 2004). In 2017, his first North-American retrospective opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and toured to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Durham currently lives and works in Berlin and Naples.