Ericka Beckman

Since the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman has forged a signature visual language in film, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child’s play, games, folklore, or fairytales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colors. Throughout her work, Beckman engages with profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power, and control.

Accompanying an exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, which will include selected works spanning thirty years of her career, this book contextualizes Beckman’s practice within this major showing of her work—the first to fully survey her contribution in a U.S. museum. With a foreword by Paul C. Ha and new essays by Attilia Fattori Franchini, Henriette Huldisch, and Piper Marshall, Ericka Beckman offers an art historical consideration of Beckman’s early Super-8 Films, as well as a critical look at her ongoing preoccupation with the structures of games, gambling, and capitalism.

Featuring thirty color illustrations, including photo-documentation of Beckman’s works since 1983 and installation views of the List Center exhibition, Ericka Beckman provides new insight into this inventive woman artist.