Peter Christenson (b.1979, USA) is a multiform conceptualist who works across media, platforms, and environments. He has dressed as a tomato and two-stepped through rural America, dug holes in the earth and dropped cameras into the darkness, been shot at by paintballs to explore gun violence and reform, made films to question sycophantic fandom, staged cosplay marches to raise funding for youth shelters, collaborated with disabled activists to explore accessibility, designed robots that paint in his blood, photographed people photographing themselves, and tailored apps to track, map, and promote the removal of litter.
As a social worker and former psychotherapist, Christenson often uses the moniker PSYCHOLOGARTIST to highlight the interdisciplinary, socially-engaged, and interventionist nature of his practice, regularly classifying projects with a specific diagnostic code from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," a widely accepted instrument for psychiatric diagnosis. These psychiatric-coded art projects satirically critique the institutions of both Art and Psychiatry, but ironically have also come to serve as psychosocial case studies of self and community, and eccentric explorations into pathology, breakthrough, and the human condition.
Christenson is the recipient of a number of awards including a US-UK Fulbright Scholar Award in Art & Design and the Governor's Arts & Heritage Young Arts Leader Award for the state of Washington. He has received recent funding from the Collective Power Fund (via Northwest Film Forum / Andy Warhol Foundation), Humanities WA, Common Field Network Los Angeles, Shunpike, the Washington State Arts Commission, The Jack Straw Cultural Center, the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and the Do Good Fund PEI. He has lectured, exhibited, and screened his work broadly, at venues including the Armory Center for the Arts, the Bregenz Biennale, Sydney Non Objective Contemporary Art Projects, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Museo Valenciano de la Ilustración y la Modernidad, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Autonomni Kulturni Centar Medika, The Royal College of Music Stockholm, The Academy of Fine Arts Zagreb, Camp As One Vityazevo, and at festivals including Edmonton International Film Festival, Festival Internacional de Videoarte Camagüey, Detroit-Windsor International Film Festival, and the Oscar-qualifying shorts program at Cinequest Film Festival.
Christenson is co-founder of Left of Centre, a guerrilla-marketing firm and artist collective, the catalyst behind the interventionist collaborative Null Set, and Director of the Guest House Cultural Capital Residency scholar program. His art can be found in several private and public collections including the abcD of the Visual Research Centre at the University of Dundee, the City of Burien and the City of SeaTac Public Art commissions, and at the Franklin Furnace Archive at the Pratt Institute. Christenson is a curator for the state of WA Art in Public Places program and an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University, where you'll most likely find him dancing or crying in his office.
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