Jim Dine

Dine's first formal training took the form of night courses at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, in which he enrolled in 1952 at the age of 16, while attending Walnut Hills High School. In 1954, while still attending evening courses, Dine was inspired by a copy of Paul J. Sachs' Modern Prints and Drawings (1954), particularly by the German Expressionist woodcuts it reproduced, including work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and Max Beckmann (1884–1950)—"I was shocked by them" — and began creating woodcuts in the basement of his maternal grandparents, with whom he was then living. After high school, Dine enrolled at the University of Cincinnati. Under printmaking teacher Donald Roberts (1923–2015) Dine experimented in lithography, etching, intaglio, dry paint and woodcuts. At Roberts' suggestion, Dine subsequently studied for six months with Ture Bengtz (1907–1973) at the School of Fine Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, before returning to Ohio University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1957 (remaining for an additional year to make paintings and prints, with the permission of the faculty).

In 1958 Dine moved to New York, where he taught at the Rhodes School. In the same year he founded the Judson Gallery at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village with Claes Oldenburg and Marcus Ratliff, eventually meeting Allan Kaprow and Bob Whitman: together they became pioneers of happenings and performances, including Dine's The Smiling Workman of 1959. Dine's first exhibition was at the Reuben Gallery, where he also staged the elaborate performance Car Crash (1960), which he describes as "a cacophony of sounds and words spoken by a great white Venus with animal grunts and howls by me." Another important early work was The House (1960), an environment incorporating found objects and street debris, installed at the Judson Gallery. Dine continued to include everyday items (including personal possessions) in his work, which linked him to Pop Art—an affinity strengthened by his inclusion in the influential 1962 exhibition "New Painting of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum, curated by Walter Hopps and later cited as the first institutional survey of American Pop Art, including works by Robert Dowd, Joe Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, and Andy Warhol.

with Ted Berrigan, Arts Lab, Soho, London, 1969 Poetry Project, with Ted Berrigan, St. Mark's Church, New York, 1970 Segue Series, with Diana Michener and Vincent Katz, Bowery Poetry Club, New York, 2005 Tangent reading series with Diana Michener and Vincent Katz, Portland, 2008 Bastille reading with Marc Marder and Daniel Humair, Paris, 2010 Bastille reading with Marc Marder, Galerie Eof, Paris, 2014 Poetry Project, with Dorothea Lasky, St. Mark's Church, New York, 2015 with Karen Weiser, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2016 with Vincent Broqua, University of Sussex, Brighton, 2017 Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2018 House of Words (ongoing) Günter Grass Archive, Göttingen, 2015 with Marc Marder, Galerie Eof, Paris, 2015 with Marc Marder, Poetry Foundation, Chicago, 2016 Ecrivains en bord de mer, La Baule, 2017 with Daniele Roccato and Fabrizio Ottaviucci, Chiesa dei Santi Luca e Martina, Rome, 2017 In Vivo, with Daniele Roccato and Fabrizio Ottaviucci, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2018