Stan Douglas

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas (b. 1960) has created films and photographs—and more recently theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects—that investigate the parameters of their medium. His ongoing inquiry into technology's role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible.

Douglas was born in Vancouver and studied at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver in the early 1980s. He is the Chair of the Graduate Art program at ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California. Douglas was one of the earliest artists to be represented by David Zwirner, where he had his first American solo exhibition in 1993. The artist has since had seventeen solo presentations with the gallery, most recently in 2023, where a presentation of his work inaugurated the gallery’s new location in Los Angeles.

A solo exhibition of Douglas's work will be on view at the Parque de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, starting May 28, 2024. In 2022, the artist represented his native Canada at the Venice Biennale. Subsequently, the exhibition Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 traveled around Canada with stops at The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (Fall 2022); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (February–April 2023); and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (September 2023–August 2024). The solo exhibition Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 was subsequently on view in 2023 at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, the Netherlands.

The artist’s permanent public commission, Penn Station’s Half Century, was unveiled in Moynihan Train Hall, Penn Station, New York, in 2021. This body of work, commissioned by Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund on the occasion of the dedication of New York City’s new Moynihan Train Hall, is composed of nine vignettes arranged into four thematic panels that explore the rich history of Penn Station.

Stan Douglas: Potsdamer Schrebergärten was on view at DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam, Germany, in 2022. The solo presentation Stan Douglas: Revealing Narratives was on view at the Phi Foundation, Montreal, in the same year, and later traveled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax. Douglas’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide since the 1980s, including the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2019-2020); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2016); Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2016); WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels (2015); and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2015). In 2013, a major survey of the artist’s work, Stan Douglas: Photographs 2008–2013, was presented at Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes, France. It traveled as Stan Douglas: Mise en scène to Haus der Kunst, Munich; Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen; and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; through 2015.

Other major solo presentations of the artist’s work were held at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2012); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2007); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); Serpentine Gallery, London (2002); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994); and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (1987).

The artist’s work was featured in the Venice Biennale in 1990, 2001, 2005, and 2019, and in Documenta in 1992, 1997, and 2002. At the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, Douglas debuted his video installation Doppelgänger and also presented a selection of photographs from his 2017 series Blackout. Douglas’s first multimedia theater production, Helen Lawrence, debuted at The Arts Club Theatre Company, Vancouver, in March 2014 and has subsequently been hosted by the Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich; Edinburgh International Festival; Canadian Stage, Toronto; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; deSingel, Antwerp; and Center for the Art of Performance, University of California, Los Angeles (co-organized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

Douglas has been the recipient of notable awards, including the Audain Prize for Visual Art (2019); the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). In 2021, Douglas was knighted as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture.

Work by the artist is held in major museum collections, including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Vancouver Art Gallery; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Douglas lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles.