Michael Ashkin

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{{Short description|American artist}}

Michael Ashkin is an American artist who makes sculptures, videos, photographs and installations depicting marginalized, desolate landscapes.{{cite news |last1=Gabriel |first1=Trip |title=Trafficking in Toxic Waste and Human Loneliness |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/06/arts/trafficking-in-toxic-waste-and-human-loneliness.html |work=The New York Times |date=April 6, 1997}} He is a professor at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.{{cite web |title=Michael Ashkin |url=https://aap.cornell.edu/people/michael-ashkin |website=Cornell AAP |accessdate=4 October 2018}} Ashkin was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.{{cite web |title=Michael Ashkin |url=https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/michael-ashkin/ |website=John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation |accessdate=4 October 2018 |date=2009}}

Ashkin is best known for his use of miniature scale and modest materials.{{cite news |last1=Cotter |first1=Holland |title=Art in Review; Andrea Zittel -- Michael Ashkin |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/arts/art-in-review-andrea-zittel-michael-ashkin.html |work=The New York Times |date=June 10, 2005}} He had his first solo show in 1996, and his floor sculpture called No. 49, was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. His work has been featured at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York,{{cite news |last1=Cotter |first1=Holland |title=ART IN REVIEW; Michael Ashkin |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/25/arts/art-in-review-michael-ashkin.html |work=The New York Times |date=February 25, 2000}} the Renaissance Society in Chicago,{{cite web |title=Watery, Domestic |url=http://renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/432/watery-domestic/ |publisher=The Renaissance Society |accessdate=4 October 2018 |date=November 17, 2002}} Vienna Secession,{{Cite web|url=https://www.secession.at/en/exhibition/michael-ashkin-2/|title=Michael Ashkin « secession|website=www.secession.at|language=en-US|access-date=2018-10-25}} and in Documenta11 in Germany.

Ashkin authored Garden State, a book which compares the New Jersey Meadowlands to a formal garden. In 2014, A-Jump Books published Ashkin's Long Branch a book of

photographs and text documenting the destruction of a New Jersey neighborhood {{cite news |last1=Shinkle |first1=Eugenie |title=Capitalism as a Bearer of the Uncanny: An Interview with Michael Ashkin |url=https://www.americansuburbx.com/2016/04/capitalism-as-a-bearer-of-the-uncanny-an-interview-with-michael-ashkin.html |work=American Suburb X |date=April 28, 2016}} and in 2018 TIS Books published a book of photographs from Berlin entitled Horizont. Ashkin's were it not for was published in 2019 with FW:Books, and combines photographs of the Mojave desert with sentences that begin with the book's title.

Ashkin was born in Morristown, New Jersey, the son of Arthur Ashkin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist,{{cite web |last1=Fleischman |first1=Tom |title=Arthur Ashkin, Ph.D. '52, shares Nobel Prize in physics |url=http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/10/arthur-ashkin-phd-52-shares-nobel-prize-physics |publisher=Cornell Chronicle |date=October 2, 2018}} and the nephew of the physicist Julius Ashkin. Before returning to art school, Ashkin taught Arabic and received an M.A. in Middle East Languages from Columbia University, and supported himself as a computer programmer.