Anne Turyn (b. 1944)

Anne Turyn is a Hallwalls original, noted since her beginnings as an artist eager to combine word and image and other media. Her anchor achievement was a series of pulp paper magazines collectively known as Top Stories, published from 1979 to 1991 in collaboration with other artists, including Laurie Anderson, Richard Prince, Kathy Acker, and Ann Hamilton. Together, they would decide a topic and a role and create together; sometimes with Turyn as a photo-illustrator, sometimes as a writer, however it evolved. This exploration of the development of meanings carries forward in much of her work, particularly articulate in the Illustrated Memories series, collected by major museums, notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA. Turyn’s gift from that series is particularly expressive, inferring both ends of a communication linkage through just two photographs: The speaker, that is the person depicted in one with the camera creating the image, and the receiver inferred in the other, deciphering the sent image, piece by piece, selectively building the puzzle of cognition, making sense of it all. The artist teaches now at Pratt Institute and lives in New York City. She is credited with being the lead artist in exploring narrative, the Top Story, in post-modern art.—AB