Dorit Cypis

Counter to much feminist work of the time, Cypis focused on interiority and personal mythologies rather than exterior political realms, and according to art historian Elizabeth Armstrong, made a significant contribution to discourse about the representation of women and female sexuality. Cypis's work has often moved between studio and social practice, including the direction and creation of initiatives in Minneapolis and Los Angeles bridging art and social change. Her later art has shifted toward broader considerations of identity related to history, memory, space and geopolitics, and been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Orange County Museum of Art. Cypis has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and City of Los Angeles, among others. • Illustration — Dorit Cypis, X-Rayed (detail), in situ immersive media installation, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1988.

Dorit Cypis studied at Sir George Williams University, California Institute of the Arts and Pepperdine University. The recorded working language is English. Work by Dorit Cypis is recorded in the collections of National Gallery of Canada and Vtape. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Name — Dorit Cypis דורית ציפיס • Born — 1951 • Birthplace — Tel Aviv, Israel • Known for — Installation art, photography, performance, social practice • Education — California Institute of the Arts, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Pepperdine University • Style — Conceptual, feminist • Website — Dorit Cypis • Awards — Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment of the Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, City of Los Angeles

Aya Dorit Cypis was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1951. In 1958, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada. After exploring sociology at Sir George Williams University, she graduated with degrees in art education and fine art in 1974 from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, studying with conceptual artists Garry Neill Kennedy and David Askevold. In 1977, she completed an MFA at Cal Arts, whose faculty at the time included Michael Asher and John Baldessari; among her early work was the feminist performative video, Exploring Comfort. After graduating, Cypis directed Foundation for Art Resources (FAR), a Los Angeles nonprofit that partnered artists with private and public organizations to site art within the city from 1976 to 2016. She exhibited widely, including shows at The Clocktower Gallery, Artists Space and White Columns in New York and LACE in Los Angeles. In 1983, she moved to Minneapolis, and joined the faculty at Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1983–8). She eventually attracted wider attention for increasingly politicized work that was influenced by cinema, music and dance, with shows at the Whitney Museum, New Museum, SFMOMA, and Walker Art Center, among others. She also founded Kulture Klub Collaborative, a project involving artists and homeless teens that bridged creative expression and survival. After returning to Los Angeles in 1999, Cypis taught at institutions including USC, CalArts, UCLA, and Otis College of Art and Design until 2018. In 2005, she completed a master's degree in Dispute Resolution (MDR) at Pepperdine University and has since worked as a mediator.

Critics aligned the strategies of Cypis's early work (e.g., In Quest of the Impresario: Courage, 1982) with feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger and Dara Birnbaum, who sought to unmask and disrupt patriarchal systems of viewing and representation. By the mid-1980s, however, she moved beyond appropriation and pastiche to a deeper psychophysical engagement with the female body, representation and sexual identity, confronting social conventions with strategies of provocation, defamiliarization and stream-of-conscious association. She integrated photomontage and projection, performance and movement, sound and spectator involvement, often upending the roles of viewer and viewed. Writer Abigail Solomon-Godeau singled out this work as grounded in a "utopianism of the body" that staked out a corporeal reality beyond idealized, repressive representations as a site of self-possession and self-knowledge. In multi-slide and sound pieces including Love After Death (1986), Cypis overlaid emotionally and psychologically loaded imagery—erotic photographs, borrowings from media, medicine, religion and Renaissance painting, haunting family snapshots, exotic travel slides—to create phantasmagoric installations that engulfed performers and spectators in a fluctuating tableau of audio and visual stimuli. Rather than re-invoke dominant cultural tropes, her imagery suggested multiple, equivalent meanings, role reversals involving gender and agency, and a concept of "self" extending beyond one's body and lifetime to other generations and the collective unconscious (e.g., Lucy and the Vampire; A Sacred Prostitute (one in herself), 1990). • Illustration — Dorit Cypis, The Body in the Picture (Robert Randolph), C-Print photograph, stat, 40" x 30", one of multiple portrait series, 1993. Cypis faced controversy for addressing themes of sexuality during an era of heightened culture-war tensions around art, sexuality, the AIDS crisis, funding and censorship. Her installation X-Rayed (1988, Whitney Museum) incorporated sound, performance and more than 300 images—one-third depicting a naked woman exploring her body through looking at book images and at herself. Challenging stereotypes, it explored both empowerment—whether a woman can possess her body while being looked at—and thorny, socially conditioned feelings of shame, guilt and repulsion; such feelings extended to the work's subject, who reacted publicly and threatened litigation to block its future presentation. A year later, Cypis produced X-Rayed, (altered), replicating the original images by substituting her own naked body for the model's. Artweeks Tony Reveaux described its choreography of imagery and gazes (of Cypis, the camera, and viewer) as "a beguiling and unnerving walk-through cubist self-portrait of sexual recognition and identity." In subsequent exhibitions, Cypis broadened her examinations of identity, drawing comparisons to Carolee Schneemann and Cindy Sherman. With Yield (the body) (1989), she played with traditional, gendered notions of artist and model (and portrait and self-portrait), inviting four female photographers including Nan Goldin to photograph her unclothed in order to consider if how women look at a woman's body is informed by the male gaze. In the performance The Inquisition (1991), Cypis further questioned the cultural construction and distortion of sexuality by appearing in the role of "the inquisitor" questioning Miss Jones from the 1972 video The Devil in Miss Jones. For The Body in the Picture (1993), Cypis photographed participants physically interacting with projected autobiographical and media images that they chose; The Boston Globe deemed them "psychophotos—the capturing of the mind on emulsion."

Cypis's mediation work grew out of her artistic focus on identity, social relations, and increasingly, social justice. After earning her Dispute Resolution (MDR) master's degree, she founded Foreign Exchanges in 2006, an initiative that offered strategies to bridge personal and cultural differences by combining aesthetics, conflict resolution and somatic arts. In 2008, she became a founding member of Mediators Beyond Borders and served as chair of the organization's Middle East Initiative; her work there included a 2009 mediation visit to the Israeli village Neve Shalom–Wahat al-Salam following the Gaza War, in which she used sensorial walks to build trust. Cypis has developed several public programs in Los Angeles, many involving communities and law enforcement. In 2014, after partnering with the Los Angeles Department of Human Relations to gain understanding of chronic community conflict, she co-founded North East Youth Council (NEYC) to build leadership skills for at-risk-youth, develop community projects, and improve relations with police. She has partnered with Days of Dialogue – The Future of Policing since 2015 as dialogue facilitator and has designed numerous forums on race and identity. In 2018, Cypis founded the platform PeoplesLab – transforming conflict into possibility, which employs somatic, perceptual, psychological and procedural communication skills-training to engage conflict and develop capacity for creative social-justice change. She presented One Another, an interactive presentation exploring strategies for intimate engagement across difference, in 2019 at NAVEL in Los Angeles. In addition to teaching courses on identity, social relations and conflict transformation at higher learning institutions, Cypis has contributed essays on art and mediation to books (The Mediation Handbook: Research, Theory, and Practice, 2017), journals (Association for Conflict Resolution Magazine, East of Borneo), and institutions including the Walker Art Center.