Shimon Attie - Starstruck: An American Tale
Starstruck: An American Tale maps the artist Shimon Attie’s newest project, a cut through the layers of America past and present at the site of the historic steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The monograph documents Attie’s multi-year project filming community members and the resulting exhibition at the Lehigh University Art Galleries.
Starstruck: An American Taledocuments Attie’s multi-year project of excavating stories of the city by filming community members, clothed in contemporary and historical dress, transiting iconic local buildings and topography – and the resulting exhibition at the Lehigh University Art Galleries, anchored by a two-channel video and a modified scaled facsimile of Bethlehem’s 90-foot tall lighted sculptural representation of the biblical Star of Bethlehem, a civic project from the 1930s that overlooks the city to this day. The book is published together with the Lehigh University Art Galleries.
From the city’s founding by Moravian Christian utopian settlers in 1741, through to its industrial heyday in the late 19th to 20th centuries as a capital of the American steel industry, to the collapse of its steel mill and manufacturing in the 1980s and 1990s, and subsequent post-industrial reincarnation with a new casino and gambling, Bethlehem is a microcosm of America’s hopes and dreams, failures and realities. Starstruck: An American Tale probes this uneasy, distinctly American blend of utopian aspirations, industrial capitalism, and the dream of “making it big”, which have defined life in Bethlehem and other communities across the United States since the country’s founding.
Shimon Attie (artist)
Born in Los Angeles and based in New York, Attie began his career in Berlin in the early 1990s, where he projected photographs of prewar Jewish street life onto the buildings where the images were originally taken. For more than three decades, he has explored how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine relationships between space, time, place and identity, and to animate urban space with imagery of its lost histories, marginalised communities and speculative futures. His practice extends across video, photography and immersive multimedia projects in museums and galleries, to site-specific installations for public spaces in Berlin, Copenhagen, New York, Rome, San Francisco, the Israel-Palestine border and other locations. He has shown in group and solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art and Jewish Museum, New York; National Gallery of Art and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Saint Louis Art Museum; Wexner Center for the Arts; National Museum of Wales; and Centre Georges Pompidou. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize recipient and holds the Lee Krasner Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. In 2021–2022 Attie was the Theodore U Horger Artist in Residence in the Department of Art, Architecture and Design at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, where Starstruck: An American Tale was developed and exhibited.
