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{{Infobox artist
| image =
| bgcolour =
| name = Vik Muniz
| imagesize =
| caption = Vik Muniz, 2012
| birth_name = Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz
| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|1961|12|20|mf=y}}
| birth_place = ]
| nationality = ] and ]
| field = Visual Artist
| training =
| movement =
| patrons =
| awards =
}}


'''Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz''', known as '''Beimnet Lover''' ({{IPA-pt|ˈvik muˈnis}}; born 1961, ], ]), is a ] living in ]. Muniz began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980s. Muniz became best known for his 1997 series Pictures of Chocolate and 2006's Pictures of Junk.
‘’’Vik Muniz Muniz (Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz)’’’ (born December 20th, 1961) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was born into a working-class family in Sao Paulo, Brazil. As a young man he was shot in the leg whilst trying to break up a fight. He received compensation for his injuries and used this money to fund a trip to New York City, where he has lived and worked since the late 1980s. He began his career as a ] but gradually became more interested in photographic reproductions of his work, eventually turning his attention exclusively to ]. He incorporates a multiplicity of unlikely materials into this photographic process. Often working in series, Vik has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to create bold, witty and often deceiving images drawn from the pages of ] and ]. His work has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. His solo show at MAM in Rio de Janeiro was second only to Picasso in attendance records; it was here that Vik first exhibited his "Pictures of Garbage Series" in Brazil. <ref name="imbd">{{Cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1268204/ |title=Waste Land |reflist }}</ref> Over the years he has remade, and then photographed, Corot landscapes from thread, Marilyn Monroe from diamonds, various Process Art pieces from dust and, perhaps most famously, sugar cane child laborers from sugar. Other works have employed luncheon meat, chocolate, coins, wire, spices, junk, tiny toys, dominoes and dry pigment. <ref>"Roberta Smith, September 15, 2011, ]"</ref>


In 2010, the documentary film '']'', directed by ], featured Muniz's work on one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jardim Gramacho, on the outskirts of ]. The film was nominated to the ] at the ].<ref>{{cite web
| url = http://www.wastelandmovie.com/index.html
| title = Waste Land
| accessdate = 2011-01-21
| publisher = wastelandmovie
}}</ref>


Vik Muniz often appropriates the images that serve as the basis for his artworks from works by other well-known artists. For example, Muniz used ] and ] in the creation of the work ''Double Mona Lisa, After Warhol'', 1999, based on a 1963 screen print by pop artist ] and which, in turn, was an appropriation of ]'s ].
== Life and Career ==

=== Early Life ===
Vik was born in the center of the city of São Paulo, Brazil, in 1961 – an only child to parents Maria Celeste and Vicente – a switchboard operator at a telephone company and a waiter, respectively. While his parents were at work, Vik was taken care of by his grandmother, Ana. She would sit on a sofa every afternoon and read books and magazines with her grandson. Vik recalls that by the end of his second year in school, he had read Voltaire’s Candide and Zadig, but still was not able to write a single word. He adds: "at the age when most children were abandoning the complexity of visual language to embrace the practicality of the alphabet, I, out of frustration at not being able to grasp it, went the other way and started to draw." At fourteen years-old he won a contest in an arts festival for public schools and was awarded a partial scholarship at an academic studio for drawing and sculpture. His parents helped him to pay for that after-school activity for another three years. As an only child, he became "addicted to groups" that involved reading, cultural-interest, museum-discussion, experimental-theatre. For less than one year he had studied advertising at Fundação Armando Álvaro Penteado (FAAP) in São Paulo. <ref>Vik Muniz, Reflex, A Vik Muniz Primer, ], 2005 </ref>

=== Early Career ===
"Vik Muniz often says that while he considers himself an American artist, his use of imagery owes everything to Brazil, where he was born and raised", wrote ]’ Carol Kino.
The photographer grew up in Brazil during a period when logic and "convention," along with a unitary and simplistic version of the world, were being forcefully imposed on the population by the military regime. "We all became very cynical about mass information and very good at metaphoric codes. My generation felt as annoyed by the oppressive fortress being built around us as it did for the ever nagging and whinny propaganda of the pamphleteers trying to destroy it. We felt that was neither our obligation to live in a world invented by others nor our responsibility to change it"<ref>Vik Muniz, Reflex, A Vik Muniz Primer, ], 2005 </ref>, he recalls. By the end of the seventies, the predominant political discourse that permeated all levels of cultural production in Brazil gave way to a more disorganized, satirical, burlesque type of sensibility. "We wanted a theater that was circus like, we wanted comedy, laughter, non-sense and, above all, we wanted to understand how art could be done without dependency on a subject or a point-of-view. At this moment, I drifted throughout my adolescence by working sets for experimental theater groups and writing comedy sketches that were never staged", he recounts. <ref>Vik Muniz - Interview with Spanish artist Juan Uslé, Catalog Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Malaga, September, 2012</ref> "Yet his own stars seem to have been remarkably well aligned", wrote Kino.<ref>, "Carol Kino,], October 21st 2010" </ref>

Although he grew up in a poor family in São Paulo, his habit of expressing himself with tiny hieroglyphic drawings won him a scholarship to an art school. At 18, buoyed by an intense fascination with perception and optics, he talked himself into a job with a billboard company and became something of an advertising wunderkind. That career ended abruptly when he was shot in the leg on his way to his first black-tie gala. His assailant, to ensure that he didn’t press charges, offered him cash. Mr. Muniz took the money and decided to try his luck in America.
By 1983 he was in New York, working as a framer and living in the East Village while its gallery scene was booming", wrote Kino. Vik took theatre and scenography classes The New School and Philosophy at New York University. "When he happened across Jeff Koons’s enigmatic vacuum cleaner and basketball sculptures at International With Monument, he said: "I realized that I could be an artist too. He was speaking my language." A friend lent him a studio space, and Mr. Muniz began making his own objects, like a shiny shelf intended to gather dust, or a pre-Colombian drip coffee maker. In 1988 he had his first New York solo gallery show. Then he began experimenting with drawing and photography. On a 1996 trip to St. Kitts he discovered the perfect blend of all three mediums when he befriended some families at a sugar plantation and took Polaroids of them. Back in New York, he tried to figure out what made the children look so luminous while their parents seemed so broken down. After realizing the difference was a lifetime spent working with sugar, he used the glittering grains to draw and form the children’s portraits on black paper, and photographed the results. The Museum of Modern Art chose them for its 1997 “New Photography” roundup, and Mr. Muniz’s career as a photographer was born. "He was always interested in visual theory and the vernacular," said Brent Sikkema, his dealer. “But this was a defining moment.”<ref> , Carol Kino, ], October 21st 2010 </ref>

== Photography ==
A photographer and self-described ‘low-tech illusionist’ Muniz has created images in a wide-range of materials -- from chocolate and sugar to junk and toys to creating images, often art-historical, that he records with a camera. He has had solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The International Center of Photography, Paco Imperial in Rio, MACRO in Rome among others. His work is in the collections of the MOMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Daros Latin America, Zurich, Switzerland, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Pãulo, Brazil, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, The Tate Gallery, London, UK, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. <ref> by Sikkema Jenkins & Co, accessed August 22nd, 2012.</ref>

== Selected Public Collections ==
Centro Cultural Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain <ref> </ref>

The ], Los Angeles, California

The ], New York

Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil <ref></ref>

The ], New York

The ], London, UK

For the complete list, please visit .

== Documentaries ==
FILM/VIDEO

2010- Waste Land.
Directed by Lucy Walker, UK, and co-directed by João Jardim and Karen Harley; produced by Almega Projects.
Vik Muniz was the subject of the Academy Award nominated documentary film Waste Land (2010) which followed his work with a group of catadores – pickers of recyclable materials – in Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest garbage dump located outside Rio de Janeiro. In recognition of his contributions to education and social development including his work with the catadores, he was recently named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. <ref name="imbd">{{Cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1268204/ |title=Waste Land |reflist }}</ref>

Winner of Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; Winner of Amnesty International Film Prize and Panorama Audience Award at Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin, Germany; Winner of Audience Award at Maui Film Festival, Wailea, Hawaii; Audience Award for Best Film at The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Durham, North Carolina; Winner of Audience Award for Best Documentary at Provincetown International Film Festival, Provincetown, Massachusetts.

2008- Caught in the Act. Art in Brooklyn.
Brooklyn Independent Television <ref>,Produced by Jonathan Lief, Natasha Gaspard and Randy Stulberg. </ref>

2002- The Egg Show: episode Inspiration.
Produced and Broadcasted at ], Channel Thirteen, New York.

2001-Worst Possible Illusion: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz.
Mixed Green Productions (54 min.).
Director and Producer: Anne-Marie Russel.<ref></ref>

Otherwise known as one of the art world’s rising young stars, the Brazilian artist invites viewers on a tour of his life, work and mind in WORST POSSIBLE ILLUSION: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz. The documentary follows Vik on a whimsical, world-hopping journey from his studio in Brooklyn, New York; to his native Brazil for a visit to his grandmother; to Chicago, his first home in the United States where he worked as a gas-station attendant and pushed carts in a grocery store; to Arizona, where he creates a gigantic bone "excavation" in the desert and goes to extraordinary lengths to capture it on film. <ref>, "Anne-Marie Russel, Independent Lens, ], 2003</ref>

TED Talk,“Vik Muniz: Art with wire, sugar, chocolate and string” <ref>, ], Monterey California 2003</ref>

=== Vik on color ===
"I wanted to make color pictures that talked about color and also talked about the practical simplification of such impossible concepts. While I was trying to develop a pictorial meta-language to deal with the phenomenon, I started to realize a great deal about my obsession with making pictures that reveal their process and material structure. My work developed during a time when industrial design migrated its emphasis from form to molecular structure, in a time when information itself was atomized into a numerical organization, and even we started facing the prognostic of becoming ourselves a code. My intellectual youth was wasted as a willing bystander in the middle of the shootout between structuralist and post-structuralist critique. This all became very clear to me after I emerged from a three and a half hour trance while looking at mosaics in a church in Ravenna." <ref> Vik Muniz and Juan Uslé - "En el sombrero de copa, o de cristal": una conversación. Catalog. Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Malaga, September, 2012 </ref>

=== Vik on photography ===
"I prefer my pictures to the ones the professional photographer took, When I took the photographs, I intuitively search for a vantage point that would make the picture identical to the ones in my head before I’d made the works. My photographs matched those mental images". <ref>Vik Muniz, Reflex, A Vik Muniz Primer, Aperture Foundation, 2005. </ref>
"We find ourselves at the precise moment of photography that painters were when photography was invented. It is as if the ghost of painting came to haunt photography wearing the guises of digital imaging. But photography did not kill painting, as was quickly claimed. Instead, it freed painting from its responsibility to depict the world as fact, to really become as Leonardo once put it "cosa mentale." Picasso once said of photography: "now at least we know everything that painting isn’t." But in fact photography prompted painting to ask a much bigger question, that is –What is painting after photography? A question repeated like a mantra in the wake of its equal obsolescence as a trustful depository of visual memories. What is it? What is it for? As much as paintmers multiplied the number of excuses to continue their trade, I expect photography to follow a similar course and becoming more self-defining, more ludic, more inquisitive." <ref>Vik Muniz and Juan Uslé - "En el sombrero de copa, o de cristal": una conversación. Catalog. Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Malaga, September, 2012</ref>

== Awards ==
2010
Honored with the Ordem do Ipiranga<ref> </ref> by the governor José Serra. São Paulo, Brazil, March 17.

2009
Honored with the Prêmio Cidadão Carioca 2009 by the State of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Honored with the Medalha da Inconfidência<ref></ref> by the governor of Minas Gerais, Mr. Aécio Neves. Minas Gerais, Brazil, April 21.
2008
Honored at CITYarts’ 40th Anniversary sponsored by Dr. Miriam & Sheldon G. Adelson, Candia Fisher, Winston Fisher, and chaired by Jane Holzer. New York, NY.

2007 Society for News Design Annual Creative Competition Award of Excellence in the category of Magazine Cover Design for the cover of The New York Times Magazine.

2005
National Artist Award granted by the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, Colorado.
Premio Villa de Madrid de Fotografía “Kaulak" 2005, awarded by the Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.

1999
Líderes Latinoamericanos para el Nuevo Milenio. CNN Time. NY, USA.

1998
Best Photography Exhibition, Second Place: Vik Muniz: Seeing is Believing. Awarded by The International Center of Photography and curated by Charles Stainback.

(source Vik Muniz Studio)

== Social Projects ==
The Quiet of the Land, Everyday Life, Contemporary Art, and Projecto Axé (1999). The Quiet of the Land was a project where 19 artists along w/ organizer France Morin lived in Salvador, Bahia from April through October of 1999. They were there to live in the community and partner with Projecto Axé, a local organization that works with the city's street children. The project culminated with a catalogue and exhibition of these collaborative projects. Vik's project, titled Invisible Object, draws it's inspiration from Giacometti's sculpture Hands Holding the Void (The Void) from 1934 as well as his own less than affluent youth. Vik asked the kids to draw their desires and to fabricate the objects they drew out of cardboard. These items were ceremoniously but in a black velvet bag. He then made two sets of black and white photographs; of the sculptures, and of the kids holding the void the object would fill. Muniz states in the catalogue that "By putting the objects away the children would be the creators of their desires and the ones who controlled it. That kind of empowerment is very rare for them. It's a pleasurable feeling of power. I told them that people will make you want things, and you can make these things into symbols and do whatever you want to them and take them out of your system."

Galpão Aplauso (NGO) - Centro Espacial Vik Muniz (project) - Lancôme (Funds). The activities with Galpão Aplauso happened over the course of three years, and resulted in the funding of a renovation of a warehouse to host the program's art school.

Spetaculu (NGO) - Vik Muniz e a Cognição do Olhar (Project) - Louis Vuitton (Funds). 1 year Photography and Art course for 22 underprivileged youth 17-24.

Spetaculu (NGO) - Passione (Soap Opera Project) - TV Globo (Funds). 2 month internship for 8 students on making of Soap Opera Opening.

Doe seu Lixo (NGO) - Curso de Capacitação para Catadores de Material Reciclável (Project) - Firjan/Coca-Cola (Funds). Management skill courses for Catadores of Jardim Gramacho. Ibiss/Associação dos Catadores do Aterro Metropolitano de Jardim Gramacho.
ACAMJG (NGO) - Lixo Extraordinário (Project). Donation of all funds provenient from the sales of "Pictures of Garbage". Money that Vik gave from the selling of the portraits of garbage.

Paper Crane for Japan. – Collaboration with students Rebuilds & Bezos Family Foundation to benefit victims of 2011 Tsunami. 2011

(source: Vik Muniz Studio)

== Quotes ==
"The habit of looking at clouds, searching for forms, although considered a popular infantile pastime, is a perfect example of the intellectual engagement. A cloud may look like a taxman if you owe the IRS."(Vik Muniz, Reflex, A Vik Muniz Primer, Aperture Foundation, 2005). 39
“The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it."<ref> , Carol Kino, ], October 21st 2010 </ref>

"My strategic obsession has something to do with finding a dynamic to negotiate between the whole and its infinite number of parts. <ref>Vik Muniz and Juan Uslé - "En el sombrero de copa, o de cristal": una conversación. Catalog. Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Malaga, September, 2012 </ref>

"Photography, my dearest, beloved muse, is perhaps the primary culprit, in the process of degeneration of visual education since its invention." <ref>Vik Muniz and Juan Uslé - "En el sombrero de copa, o de cristal": una conversación. Catalog. Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Malaga, September, 2012 </ref>

"To a desert island, I would bring the Library of Congress and its cafeteria. It holds one billion books, so I would be fine over there. Oh, and I would have the New York Times delivered daily." <ref> , Tania Menai, Brazil, October Edition, 2006. </ref>

"Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs." <ref>Vik Muniz, Reflex, A Vik Muniz Primer, ], 2005. </ref>
"Fortunately, my generation has increasingly come to terms with its “inner child", and publicly given in to the irresistible appeal of toys. (…) The success of products such as the iMac, Volkswagen’s New Beetle, and Philippe Starck’s furniture are good examples of this trend." <ref>Vik Muniz, Reflex, A Vik Muniz Primer, ], 2005. </ref>

"I've always been fond of 19th-century art. In the nineteenth century photography was invented; in the nineteenth century machines and the whole spectrum of social life, the reconfiguration of the family came into being. Even though I was born in the twentieth century, everything that has ruled and structured my life and my knowledge of society has been based upon ideas that were primarily developed during the previous century.” <ref>Vik Muniz, “Picture Stories" - interview by Linda Benedict-Jones in conjunction with the exhibition Clayton Days. The Frick Art Museum, Frick Art & Historical Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2000.</ref>

"The moment we write down an idea, we kill it – we take it out of the garden, and place it in a vase. I keep cultivating my ideas like in a garden: some of them die, some others I water so they remain beautiful. Some others cross my mind accidentally." <ref>, Tania Menai, Icaro In-flight Magazine, Brazil, August Edition, 2003. </ref>

"I have always been interested in the circus and street magicians, the kind of entertainment that counts on the poorest kind of illusion-effects and demands enormous amounts of belief and imagination. Things that allow the viewer to exercise his human qualities rather than admire those of the artist." <ref>Vik Muniz to Peter Galassi, Natura Pictrix, Interview and Essays on Photography, Edgewise, 1999.</ref>


== References == == References ==
<references/>
{{reflist|2}}


== External links == == External links ==
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Vicente José de Oliveira Muniz, known as Beimnet Lover (Template:IPA-pt; born 1961, São Paulo, Brazil), is a visual artist living in New York City. Muniz began his career as a sculptor in the late 1980s. Muniz became best known for his 1997 series Pictures of Chocolate and 2006's Pictures of Junk.

In 2010, the documentary film Waste Land, directed by Lucy Walker, featured Muniz's work on one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jardim Gramacho, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. The film was nominated to the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards.

Vik Muniz often appropriates the images that serve as the basis for his artworks from works by other well-known artists. For example, Muniz used jelly and peanut butter in the creation of the work Double Mona Lisa, After Warhol, 1999, based on a 1963 screen print by pop artist Andy Warhol and which, in turn, was an appropriation of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

References

  1. "Waste Land". wastelandmovie. Retrieved 2011-01-21.

External links

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