Andrea Fraser

Andrea Fraser (born 1965, Billings, Montana, USA) is an American performance artist and a pioneer of institutional critique whose work critically examines the social, economic, and affective structures of cultural institutions, including museums, galleries, and the broader art world. Her practice spans performance, video, text, and conceptual forms that dismantle systems of power, value, and representation. Fraser grew up in Berkeley, California, and trained at the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, where she began integrating art criticism into her artistic practice. She is best known for landmark works such as Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989), where she reimagined a museum tour to expose institutional authority; Official Welcome (2001), a satirical critique of art world ceremonial speech; and Untitled (2003), challenging the dynamics between artist and collector. Fraser’s work has been shown at major institutions worldwide, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum Ludwig, Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou. She has received prestigious awards such as the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (2013) and the Oskar Kokoschka Prize (2016). She currently lives and works between New York and Los Angeles, and serves as a professor and area head of the Interdisciplinary Studio at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture.