Work by alumnx Sondra Perry ’12 exhibited at Museum of Modern Art

Perry is one of 11 featured artists whose work is included in the exhibition “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” which opened March 5 and is on view at MoMA’s Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions through July 8.

“Through a diverse range of more than 70 works, drawn primarily from MoMA’s collection, Signals examines the ways in which artists have both championed and questioned video as an agent of social change—from televised revolution to electronic democracy,” states a MoMA press release on the exhibition. “The presentation positions video not as a traditional medium but as a transformational media network, one that has fundamentally altered the world.”

Perry, who earned a B.F.A., from Alfred University in 2012, is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist from Perth Amboy, NJ. The artist studied expanded media and three-dimensional studies as an undergraduate at Alfred University and went on to earn an M.F.A. degree from Columbia University in 2015.

The artist’s work is critically acclaimed and has earned Perry numerous awards. In December 2019, Artnet News listed a piece of Perry’s video art among the top 100 most influential pieces of art of the last decade. Ben Davis, an art critic from Artnet News – the world’s first dedicated 24-hour global art market newswire – wrote a piece titled “The 100 Works of Art That Defined the Decade, Ranked,” and placed Perry’s piece, “IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Game for Vitrine of Projection (2017)” as No. 82 on his top 100 list.

In the fall of 2018, Perry received the Nam June Paik award at a ceremony at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany. The award is given biennially to an artist working with moving images and new technology. Earlier that year, Perry was named the winner of the inaugural Toby’s Prize, a $50,000 award given to a contemporary artist by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. In 2017, the Seattle Art Museum awarded Perry its Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, which is given biennially to an emerging Black artist. Perry was also a recipient of a 2017 Biennial Grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

In February 2020, Perry’s work, “FLESH WALL,” was the subject of a month-long digital art exhibition in New York City’s Times Square. “FLESH WALL” was displayed nightly as part of the Midnight Moment exhibition series hosted by Times Square Arts, the city’s largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts.