Edgar Arceneaux, born in 1972 in Los Angeles, USA, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, installation, film, and performance. Working across media with equal command, Arceneaux investigates historical patterns, the mechanics of language, and the entangled relationships between power, identity, and memory. His installations have taken the form of labyrinths, libraries, multi-channel video environments, and drawn landscapes that shift over the course of an exhibition, always offering only a partial view of the whole. Among his most distinctive recent bodies of work is the skinned mirrors series, in which Arceneaux strips the reflective metal layer from used mirrors and transfers it onto raw canvas, producing fractured, oxidised surfaces that oscillate between beauty and ruin.
Edgar Arceneaux participated in the summer residency at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin in 2025, organised in collaboration with Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House, resulting in the solo exhibition Shards, presented at 68projects during Berlin Art Week, September to October 2025.
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Skinning the Mirror, Summer of Fire and Ice, 2025 Sold
Edgar Arceneaux was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work, based in Pasadena, California. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in 1996, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and Fachhochschule Aachen in 2000, and completed his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 2001. He is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and co-founder of the Watts House Project, a community-based urban renewal initiative in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
Arceneaux's practice resists easy categorisation. Working across drawing, installation, sculpture, performance, and film, he investigates historical patterns by abandoning linear logic in favour of wordplay, visual association, and structural fragmentation. Seemingly disparate elements, from civil rights era speeches and FBI surveillance documents to science fiction, techno music, and the crumbling architecture of Detroit, find new synchronicity in his hands, pointing toward larger historical forces such as the rise of the surveillance state and the persistence of racial violence. One of his most celebrated works reenacts Ben Vereen's tragically misunderstood blackface performance at Ronald Reagan's 1981 Inaugural Gala, a piece that encapsulates Arceneaux's method of excavating suppressed or misread histories through performance and re-enactment. His more recent skinned mirrors series takes a radical material approach: Arceneaux strips the reflective metal layer from used mirrors and transfers it onto raw canvas, producing surfaces marked by cracks, oxidised copper, toxic green, and sooty black, evoking vanitas traditions and the aesthetics of ruin while engaging directly with contemporary political rupture, including racially motivated police violence and the practices of US immigration enforcement.
Edgar Arceneaux's work is held in major public collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and the Deutsche Bank Collection. In 2025, his work Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1)was acquired as part of a new institutional initiative spearheaded by Jarl Mohn. Among his awards and fellowships: the Malcolm McLaren Award from Performa (2015), the Rauschenberg Residency (2013), the United States Artists Fellowship (2007), the ArtPace Residency (2006), the Joyce Award (2005), and a Creative Capital Grant (2005).
Arceneaux has exhibited at leading institutions across the United States, Europe, and beyond. Solo exhibitions include presentations at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2016); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2011); the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; the Lentos Art Museum, Linz; and The Kitchen and the Studio Museum in Harlem, both in New York. Major group and biennial presentations include the Whitney Biennial (2008); the Bienal de São Paulo (2011); the Shanghai Biennale (2014); the Biennale de Montréal (2014); and Performa (2015). He was featured in Art21's acclaimed television series Art in the Twenty-First Century.
In the summer of 2025, Edgar Arceneaux participated in the artist-in-residence program at 68projects by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin, organised in collaboration with Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House. From early June through July, Arceneaux immersed himself in Berlin's art scene, developing a body of new work that engaged directly with questions of identity, power, and visibility. The residency culminated in Shards, a solo exhibition presented at 68projects, Fasanenstrasse 68, Berlin, from 10 September to 25 October 2025, opening as part of Berlin Art Week. The exhibition centred on Arceneaux's skinned mirrors series, including works such as Bad Mirror 1, Bad Mirror 2, Bad Mirror 3, and Shards on a Pole (all 2025), alongside a special live performance at the opening vernissage and a second performance on 12 September. Shards marked Arceneaux's debut with the gallery.
His practice continues to expand across disciplines and geographies, binding material experimentation, historical research, and political urgency into charged narrative structures that interrogate the role of art in societies undergoing transformation.
