Vanessa Beecroft

Vanessa Beecroft (born April 25, 1969) is an Italian-born American contemporary performance artist; she also works with photography, video art, sculpture, and painting. Many of her works have made use of professional models, sometimes in large numbers and sometimes naked or nearly so, to stage tableaux vivants. She works in the United States, and is based in Los Angeles as of 2019. Her early work was focused on gender and appeared to be autobiographical; her later work is focused on race. Starting in 2008 she began working with Kanye West on collaborations and commercial projects.

Vanessa Beecroft was born April 25, 1969 in Genoa, Italy and raised in Santa Margherita Ligure and Malcesine near Lake Garda. Both of her parents were teachers; she was born to an Italian mother (Maria Luisa) and a British father (Andrew). After she was born, her family briefly moved to Holland Park, west London.

Her parents divorced when she was three years old and she did not see her father or her younger brother again until she was 15 years old. Her mother raised Beecroft alone in a village in Italy in a strict vegan and Catholic household with no cars, no television, and no phone. In childhood, she was hospitalized for overeating specific foods she thought would cleanse her system, and she struggled with an eating disorder.

From 1988 to 1993 she attended Brera Academy in Milan, Italy. Her first art exhibition VB01 (1993) was in a gallery in Milan and featured a performance with other female students from Brera Academy wearing Beecroft's clothing, and sharing Beecroft's "Book of Food", a diary documenting her food consumption from 1985 and 1993. The "Book of Food" documented Beecroft's bulimic eating habits and was referenced again in her later work, but it was separate from the performances.

She moved to the United States in 1996 at the invitation of art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, settling in New York City.

Her performance work about gender was often critiqued for being a "post-feminist statement about fashion or pandering to a corrupted way of seeing". Photographer Collier Schorr noted, "Beecroft is interested in the aesthetics of how women look when they are looked at, and her body-conscious projects encourage alienation between model, artist, and audience." Some common themes in the work include self discipline (of the models), voyeurism, and power relationships.

Beecroft's artwork is often performance or installation-based with live human figures, but she also documents the performances with photography and video; this work is in many public museum and art collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Van Abbemuseum, amongst others.

VB performances (1993–present)

Many of the VB performances were documented in the Dave Hickey book VB 08-36: Vanessa Beecroft Performances (2000), and in Emily L. Newman's book Female Body Image in Contemporary Art: Dieting, Eating Disorders, Self-Harm, and Fatness (2018).

The performances were titled sequentially: "VB" followed by a sequential performance number. There were strict rules for the models' behavior during the performances; they were instructed not to engage with the audience. Frequently the women in the performances were uniformed, nude, or barely clothed, and they were required to stand for hours, often in very tall high heels without movement or eye contact. Beecroft always used tall, thin, young models that she referred to as "girls", no matter their age. In later work, Beecroft also used designer accessories or shoes as props for the models.

• VB02, VB03, VB04, and VB08 all took place in 1994 and featured live girl models all dressed in bright red wigs (an exaggeration of Beecroft's own hair color) and white underwear. VB08 (1994) performance took place at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York, using live female models, pantyhose, and bright red wigs.
• VB25 (1996) performance took place at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, with seven identical-looking young women wearing fake eyelashes and red nail polish, each dressed in a polo-neck pullover, white underwear, tights, and high heels.
• VB35: Show (1998) took place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; twenty women stood in the museum for two hours in a circular arrangement to mirror the architecture. Fifteen of the women wore rhinestone-decorated bikinis designed by Tom Ford, and five of the women were fully nude. This was a larger event than some of her prior work and made international news.
• VB45 (2004) took place at Terminal 5 of the John F. Kennedy Airport with 36 young women standing in formation in the sunken waiting area, wearing only Afro wigs, black body paint, and silver shackles on their ankles.
• VB51 (2002) was the first filmed performance, it took place in Schloss Vinsebeck, Stenheim, Germany. It featured older models in their 60s, and included Beecroft's mother, mother-in-law, stepsister, and the actresses Irm Hermann and Hanna Schygulla (both actresses from Rainer Werner Fassbinder films, by Beecroft's favorite director).
• VB53 (2004) at the Tepidarium in Giardino dell’Orticultura, Florence, Italy, women were staged in a mound of dirt, as if they were plants.
• VB55 (2005) featured one hundred women standing still in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie for three hours, each woman oiled from the waist up and wearing nothing but a pair of pantyhose.
• VB61, Still Death! Darfur Still Deaf? (2007), one of Beecroft's most politically engaged performances, was presented the 52nd Venice Biennale. It involved "approximately 30 Sudanese women with their skin painted, lying face-down on a white canvas on the ground, simulating dead bodies piled on top of one another", representing the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
• VB65 (March 2009) performance at Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea (PAC) in Milan, Italy, featured a "Last Supper" of twenty male African immigrants, dressed formally in suits (some had no shoes), drinking water, eating chicken and brown bread without cutlery.
• VB66 (2010) took place at Mercato Ittico di Napoli [it] (the fish market), Naples, Italy with fifty living models, staged on a platform amongst a group of cast body sculptures and body parts, all painted black. It highlighted the relationships among body, sculpture, and an iconographical reference to the nearby ruins of Pompeii.
• VB67 (2010) performance took place at Studio Nicoli in Carrara, Italy, and again a similar reenactment in a year later, VB70: Marmi (2011) at Lia Rumma gallery in Milan. The models were staged near marble sculpture statues and the stone was in various states including polished, rough, and in blocks and slabs.

Other work

In October 2005, Beecroft staged a three-hour performance on the occasion of the opening of the Louis Vuitton store, "Espace Louis Vuitton" on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. For the same event, Beecroft placed models both black and white on the shelves next to Louis Vuitton bags in a "human alphabet". In 2007 the Louis Vuitton company apologized to Dutch graphic designer Anthon Beeke for mimicking his "Naked Ladies Alphabet" design without his consent.

In 2018, Beecroft and Kim Kardashian collaborated on a series of nude photos of Kardashian that were displayed on social media for the release of Kardashian's perfume, which had a "Kardashian body-shaped bottle".

Since 2008, Beecroft has been collaborating on work with artist Kanye West. They started working together with a listening party at Ace Gallery, Los Angeles for West's music albums 808s & Heartbreaks. In 2010, Beecroft was named creative lead for the Runaway music video. On the Kanye West music tour, the Yeezus Tour (October 2013 – September 2014), Beecroft designed the sets and choreography. Beecroft worked on West's Spike Joze directed music video for the 2014 song “Only One”. During the wedding ceremony of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West in 2014, Beecroft displayed her sculptures.

In February 2015, West embarked on a fashion design career with Yeezy Season 1, under the Adidas label and Beecroft directed the performance presentation. Beecroft went on to work on Yeezy Season 2 (September 2015), Yeezy Season 3 (February 2016), and Yeezy Season 4 (September 2016).

Beecroft alleged she was a full-time employee for West until 2016, when her role changed and she became a part-time contractor.

In 2019, she collaborated with West on two opera-based performances, Nebuchadnezzar and Mary.

Beecroft's work with live female nude models in performances often uses a specific type of model, one with an Westernized "idealization" of the female body, all of the models appearing uniformly thin, tall, and young. These choices have been criticized as harmful, distorted, and conforming to gender stereotypes.

Beecroft has been quoted in an interview in 2016, “I have divided my personality. There is Vanessa Beecroft as a European white female, and then there is Vanessa Beecroft as Kanye, an African-American male.” Her later work deals with race, and she has made a series of racially insensitive remarks in interviews.

Vanessa Beecroft was previously married to marketer Greg Durkin and they lived in Cold Spring Harbor, New York together for many years; the marriage ended in divorce. Durkin and Beecroft had two sons together (born in 2001 and 2004). She is currently married to photographer Federico Spadoni. Beecroft and Spadoni have one daughter and one son together (born 2009 and 2012).

Beecroft’s failed attempt to adopt Sudanese twins was the topic of the documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins (2008) by Pietra Brettkelly, which was included in the Sundance Film Festival's World Cinema Documentary Competition. The film presents Beecroft as a "hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist" and chronicles her "damaging quotes and appalling behavior" as she attempts to adopt two Sudanese orphans for use in an art exhibit.