Joseph Grigely

In the field of body criticism Grigely's work emphasizes ways the disabled body is an enabled body. His “Postcards to Sophie Calle,” originally published in the Swiss periodical Parkett and reprinted several times, is considered a seminal text in disability studies. More recent publications that have dealt with the optical turn in deafness include an essay on the deaf artist James Castle, another on Beethoven, and a critical essay on “Soundscaping” that appeared in Artforum in November 2016.

In exhibition studies, Grigely has published a number of texts in recent years. Among them is the book Exhibition Prosthetics (Bedford Press and Sternberg Press, 2010). "Exhibition Prosthetics" is a descriptive term given to an array of printed media that function to expand the reach of both art and art exhibitions: press releases, catalogues, announcements, and wall labels. A related book by Grigely, based on a series of incremental exhibitions he organized in an atrium setting, is MacLean 705 (Bedford Press, 2015).

As an artist, Grigely has built up a body of work based on two subjects: “Conversations With the Hearing,” and archives and archiving practices. The conversations with the hearing consist of notepapers hearing people have written on in the course of conversing with Grigely. These papers are saved and archived and are used as the raw material for creating narrative art: the papers are pinned to the wall in deliberately placed juxtapositions as a way of drawing from the papers both a verbal narrative and a visually abstract one in the form of a grid. Grigely is sometimes considered a proponent of Relational Aesthetics; he was included in Nicolas Bourriaud's show “Contacts” at Kunsthalle Fribourg in 2000 and “Touch: Relational Aesthetics in the 1990s” at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002.

As a scholar, Grigely's work covers a range of topics that include textual criticism; exhibition studies; and body criticism. As a textual critic, his most important work is Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism, which was published in 1995 by the University of Michigan Press. Textualterity examines artworks as dynamic objects and the ways they are made, unmade, and remade as they are disseminated in culture. The book challenges the long-held assumption of the ‘ideal’ text or ideal state, and replaces it with a consideration that what is ideal in textual studies is what is real.

As an artist, Grigely has participated in over fifty solo shows and 250 group shows since 1994. His exhibitions include the Whitney (2000, 2014), Berlin (2001), and Istanbul (1997) biennials, and solo shows at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2009, 1998); the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001) the Orange County Museum of Art (2007), The Tang Museum, Saratoga (2008), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2008) and Kunstverein Hamburg (2016). He has also exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, 2001, Metz, 2011), Kunstmuseum, Bern (2002), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004), the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2005), and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2000). A survey of Grigely's work was published as Joseph Grigely: St. Cecilia, ed. Ian Berry and Irene Hofmann. Baltimore & Saratoga Springs: The Baltimore Contemporary Museum and the Tang Museum, 2007. In 2004 he was an Artadia Awardee.

Grigely's first teaching position, in 1983, was at Gallaudet College, a liberal arts institution devoted to teaching deaf and hard of hearing students. In 1985 he was awarded an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford, where he taught in the English Department. In 1994 he was appointed as a Visiting Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and in 1995 was granted tenure in UM's School of Art. In 2002 he was appointed Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a position he still holds. At SAIC he teaches studio and seminar courses in Exhibition Prosthetics; Dissemination; the Hans Ulrich Obrist Archive; and Theorizing Disability.

Grigely grew up in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. He was deafened at the age of 10 when he fell down a hill while playing “King on the Mountain” with friends. He studied English literature at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH, where he received a BA magna cum laude in 1978. After a failed attempt at a career as a professional ice hockey player, he continued his studies in literature at Oxford University in England, and received a D.Phil. in 1984.

Joseph Grigely (born December 16, 1956) is an American visual artist and scholar. His work is primarily conceptual and engages a variety of media forms including sculpture, video, and installations. Grigely was included in two Whitney Biennials (2000, 2014), and is also a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives and works in Chicago, where he is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.