Sadie Benning
1973– · American visual artist working in video, painting and performance
Sadie Benning (Milwaukee, 1973) is an American visual artist best known for video, though they also work in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound. Benning is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. Their work explores gender, ambiguity, intimacy and identity.
Raised by a single mother who worked as a painter in a hotel's maintenance department, Benning left school at sixteen, largely because of the homophobia they faced there. They began filming with a camera given by their father, the experimental filmmaker James Benning, who taught film. It was a Fisher-Price PXL-2000, known as PixelVision, which records black-and-white, pixelated images onto audio cassettes. Benning first rejected it, but it became their main tool.
Their early videos, such as A New Year, Living Inside and If Every Girl Had a Diary, draw on an isolated environment: the bedroom, the window, the television or the dog stand in for the artist's physical presence. Over time Benning brought in their own voice and body, using extreme close-ups of face and hands. Their short films mix performance, experimental narrative, handwritten text and music, and use pop culture both to amplify and to parody its messages.
In 1993 their work appeared in the Whitney Biennial, where they were the youngest artist. In 1998 they co-founded the band Le Tigre with Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman, leaving in 2000. Their videos are distributed by Video Data Bank, and they have received grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among other recognitions.