Marian Zazeela

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Marian Zazeela (b. 1940) is a light-artist, designer, painter and musician based in New York City. Born to Russian-Jewish parents and raised in the Bronx, she was educated first at the High School of Music and Arts and then Bennington College, where she studied with Paul Feeley, Eugene C. Goossen and Tony Smith and earned a Bachelor or Arts degree with a major in Painting in 1960.

Shortly after graduation, she relocated to New York City where she provided stage design for LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka)'s The System of Dante's Hell and acted and modeled for Jack Smith (appearing in his film Flaming Creatures and photography book The Beautiful Book), before being introduced in 1962 by a mutual friend to composer La Monte Young with whom she has been associated (and, in large part, unfortunately overshadowed) ever since.

During a period of rapid growth in the early 60s, Zazeela not only joined Young's musical group as vocalist (which also included, at various times photographer Billy Name, minimalist musician Terry Riley, musician John Cale, video artist and musician Tony Conrad, and poet and musician Angus MacLise), but also produced for them light shows, among the earliest in the form, which may have inspired Andy Warhol (and contemporaneous to the early work of better-known light-artist Dan Flavin), derived from her earlier, more expressionistic calligraphic canvases and drawings, but in increasingly highly codified, if deeply psychedelic form, mostly using slides of still images, colored gels and exceedingly slow dissolves from one to the next, creating complicated optical effects. In 1965, she titled this body of work the Ornamental Lightyears Tracery; it was subsequently presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Maeght Foundation, Moderna Museet, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Documenta 5, Haus der Kunst, and Dia Art Foundation among other galleries and venues.

Over the next 30 years, she elaborated this work into increasingly environmental and sculptural forms, often incorporating the use of colored-light and colored-shadow, which she titled Dusk Adaptation Environment (installation), Still Light (sculpture), Magenta Day / Magenta Night (installation/sculpture), and, more generally, Light. Obsessed with duration and play upon the senses in saturation, by the late 60s, she began presenting light-work in collaboration with Young's music in what were envisioned as long-term installations titled Dream Houses. (One of them at 275 Church St, above the couple's loft, has run since the early 90s and is open to the public two days a week.)

In 1970, Zazeela began studies in the Kirana school of Hindustani classical music with Pandit Pran Nath, of whom she has been a devoted disciple ever since. (Pandit Pran Nath died in 1996.) She performs occasionally with Young and others. Her Selected Writings were published with Young in 1969 and a book on the two of them with writing on Zazeela by Henry Flynt and C.C. Hennix, edited by William Duckwork, was published in 1996 by Bucknell University Press. A monograph of her drawings was published in Germany in three languages ca. 2000.