Eric Gottesman

Bio

Eric Gottesman (b. 1976 Nashua, New Hampshire) teaches, organizes, writes, and makes artworks with other people. His work addresses nationalism, migration, structural violence, history and intimate relations. His projects question accepted notions of power and, by engaging communities in critical self-reflection and creative expression, propose models for repair. 

Gottesman’s work is always collaborative; he has never made an artwork alone. Gottesman has presented his collaborative art projects at health conferences, universities, in government buildings, on the televised opening of the NFL season, on indigenous reserves, in post-war rubble, and at museums like MoMA PS1, MFA Boston, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Addis Ababa City Hall, the Children's Museum of Art in New York, the Cornell Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Center of Photography, the Addison Gallery of American Art and others. Sudden Flowers, his decade-long collaboration with young people in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, toured that country in a series of street installations, and was published as a collective monograph. 

Gottesman is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2020), a recipient of an ICP Infinity Award (2017), a Creative Capital Artist (2015), a Fulbright Fellow (2012), a Lightwork resident artist (2011), an Artadia awardee (2009), a co-founder of civic art collective For Freedoms, and a co-creator of the book For Freedoms: Where Do We Go From Here? (2024). His co-translation of Ethiopian writer Baalu Girma’s banned novel Oromaye was published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, only the second published English language translation of Amharic literature.