Peter Campus

Peter Campus is an American artist and a pioneer of new media and video art, known for his interactive video installations and photography, among other works.

Campus has been working in media arts since the early 1970s. After his military service, he studied film editing at City College Film Institute and worked in the film industry as a production manager and editor. He participated in the experimental workshops at Boston’s WGBH-TV, and not long after this, he was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1976). After school, he began his career as a production manager, editor, and making documentaries. He had his first solo show in 1972 at Bykert Gallery in New York, and his first solo museum exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in 1974.

Throughout the 1970s Campus worked on influential video installations that explored issues of identity, reality, and the relationship between the viewer and the work itself. He put together one such installation at Artpark during this time. Towards the end of the 1970s, Campus began to move away from interactive work and turned his attention toward large-scale projection, investigating faces and heads as subject matter.

In the 1980s and the early 1990s, his work took a dramatic shift to landscape and nature photography, abandoning video work entirely. Describing these changes in his selected medium, Campus stated, “For me what was important was not the switch from video to photography, but from the interior to the exterior. The interior examinations became overwhelming…. I got very interested in nature. A lot of it was an escape from what was going on in the city. It was a place where all the things that were bothering me would disappear. Then, very quickly, about 1982, it became the subject of my work.” In 1996, Campus made his return to video and today works as a Clinical Associate Professor of Art, Art Education, and Artist in Residence at NYU Steinhardt.

His work is held in the collections of numerous prominent institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Tate Modern, Museo Reina Sofía, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Walker Art Center, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, among many others.