Dove Bradshaw (American, b.1949) was born in New York City where, with some education in England, residencies, and travel abroad, she currently lives and works. Beginning in 1969, she pioneered the use of indeterminacy in sculpture, painting, performance, and film. By enlisting the unpredictable effects of natural elements, she has become known for her chemical paintings that change with the atmosphere. Her early fusion of scientific exploration with art practice has anticipated activities of later generations by several decades. These impulses have come to be broadly embraced in the Science/Art movement, "weathering" works, and the genre termed
museum interventions.
Some of her gestures toward indeterminacy have embraced the chance positioning of work, the use of materials particularly susceptible to weather and indoor atmosphere, the unpredictability of birds, the gradual erosion of water, and the use of inherently unstable substances such as acetone, mercury, and sulfur.
There have been several books published on her work, including a collaboration between
John Cage and Thomas McEvilley titled
Dove Bradshaw, Works, 1969–1993. In addition, Cage selected Bradshaw to accompany him in his 1991 Carnegie International presentation, and she was represented in Cage’s similarly scored
Rolywholyover Circus, which consisted of his selection of 20th-century works. In 1984, she was appointed artistic advisor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, where she spent a decade designing sets, costumes, and lighting for the company’s stage and television productions around the world.
She has had exhibitions at prestigious venues around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the City University of New York, and is represented in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the British Museum in London, among others.
