Juan Downey

Santiago, 1940

Juan Downey was a Chilean artist born in Santiago in 1940, recognized as a pioneer of video art and video installation in the 1970s. He graduated in Architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and studied printmaking at Atelier 17, Paris, with S.W. Hayter. In 1969 he settled permanently in New York, where he produced most of his work. During his lifetime he had two solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and received several grants, including two Guggenheim Grants, a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, two Rockefeller Fellowships and several National Endowments for the Arts.