- Dennis Oppenheim’s, Device to Root Out Evil, 1997
I just read something sad. An artist died. It was Dennis Oppenheim.
Mr. Oppenheim went to the California College of the Arts (Oakland, CA) and received his MFA at Stanford. Then, like many artists, he moved to New York to pursue his art career and practice. His art work is grandiose and forces you to move in the environment differently than you normally would. I heard of him but never had the opportunity to study his work more intimately. Now, I feel compelled to do so.
Perhaps, that’s why I’m saddened by the art world’s loss. Artists are always posthumously recognized by the the rest of the world. Even if you eat, sleep, and breath art, it’s difficult to know everything and everyone and all the art movements (yes, there are TONS). Yet, I feel consolation in the fact that artists are probably the only types of human beings that create the most substantial artifacts of our civiliations within a lifetime. With such large scale work that is undoubtedly present and created with such magnitude, well, that’s quite impressive.
You can read The New York Times article here.
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Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, computational media, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work as been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. She is an advisor for Brooklyn-based arts and tech organization POWRPLNT and Bay Area-based arts organization slash arts.
dorothy r. santos 
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