Biography
Antonia Contro is a visual artist whose practice ranges from drawing and painting to site-specific installations and multidisciplinary collaborations. Contro’s work explores the nature of time and the meaning of knowledge: how and when we come to know what we know. Her materials include paint, pencil, video, collage, photography, and clay, as well as sound, and found objects.
Thus, the Night, an art film made with Spektral Quartet, premiered publicly at Aspen Film in 2024 following a private premiere at The Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. In 2024, Contro worked on sussurra, an art/music film featuring composer Eliza Brown’s 2023 commission from Classical Music Indy’s Micro Composition Project. Scorrevole, a visual and sonic collaboration with violinist Clara Lyon, was premiered in 2023 at Chicago’s Epiphany Arts Center for PARA.MAR Dance Theater. In 2021, Contro created Theorem, an exhibition for the Farnsworth House gallery, inspired by her eponymous visual and literary book with poet Elizabeth Bradfield. Theorem, the limited fine art edition, was published by Candor Arts in 2019, and a trade edition was published by Poetry Northwest Editions in 2020. Other site-specific exhibitions include Tempus Fugit at the American Philosophical Society Museum in 2012, Ex Libris at Chicago Cultural Center in 2011, Field Guide for Chicago’s Notebaert Museum in 2007–8, Closed/Open at The Newberry Library in 2006, and Descry at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 2002.
Contro’s art was featured in Captured Earth at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 2024, Was/Is/Ought and Only Connect at the Carrie Secrist Gallery in 2020-21, Surrealism: The Conjured Life at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2015–16, A Sense of Place, the Italian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, The Centennial Celebration: New Acquisitions 2001–2011 at the New York Public Library, and Chicago Artists at the Block Museum, 2007. She has received numerous private commissions.
Contro’s work is in the American Philosophical Society Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Block Museum, Brandeis University, Davis Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Illinois State Museum, Hammer Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Menil Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New York Public Library, Polaroid Collection, Smith College, Stanford, Taubman Museum, Wellesley College, Yale University, and others.
Along with the Theorem Collective, Contro was awarded a Ragdale Foundation Themed Residency in 2022. She received a CAAP grant in 2011, a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council in 2007, and was the recipient of a Rockefeller fellowship in 2002.