BIOGRAPHY

Peter Walsh
b. 1962 - New York, New York, USA
 
Peter Walsh is an artist living in New York City.

Impressed by the volatile ways in which art can reveal the economic structure that underlies human interaction, Walsh has held a crab-feast on a Manhattan rooftop as an investigation into the relationship between community-building and gift economies (Wall Street Crab Feast, 2000), re-enacted a P.T. Barnum advertising stunt as a scale model of the world’s economy (Brick Man, 2001) and created an imaginary public works project that reversed the flow of New York City’s drinking water as a way of looking at capital and resource control and allocation (Reversal of the Croton Aqueduct, 2001).

In 2006 as part of this ongoing examination of economics, Walsh began Drawing Water: Who Makes Art Valuable?, a complex multi-year drawing project that entails drawing portraits of everyone involved in the making, showing and purchasing of the portraits themselves - from the meticulous craftsperson who makes a sheet of drawing paper to the high-flying collector who lays down her cash, from the worker who digs a pigment out of the earth to the gallerist who promotes the work and sets the price. With “Drawing Water” Walsh will bring together the philosophical concerns of his earlier performance work with the beauty and meaning of making objects by hand.
 
As a co-founder the Baltimore-based arts magazine Link (1996-2006), Walsh was an editorial board member who wrote several feature articles. From 2000-2002 he was President of the non-profit Board. Link produced 10 book length arts journals beore ceasing publication in 2006..
 
Walsh has received numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship (1995), two Maryland State Art Council awards (1996 and 1993) and an Artists Space Independent Project Grant (2001).


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