Eleanor Antin
The Death of Petronius from the series The Last Days of Pompeii, 2001, printed 2023
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 700 Prospect Street
The Sahm Seaview Room: The Eleanor Antin mural is visible through the windows of the Sahm Seaview Room during daylight hours, with access on the far right of the building (facing MCASD). The Sahm Seaview Room is adjacent to The Art Park on the north side of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Viewing Hours: 8:30 AM – 4 PM, Wednesday – Sunday
Access may be limited by special events held throughout the year.
Eleanor Antin’s interdisciplinary art practice excavates various histories as a tool for exploring the present. She has been making films, photographs, videos, installations, performance works, and drawings since the early 1960s through a conceptual and feminist lens.
Antin’s mural, The Death of Petronius (The Last Days of Pompeii, 2001), is from a larger photographic series titled The Last Days of Pompeii, where the artist created elaborately staged theatrical sets informed by the aesthetic of ancient Rome. Antin worked as director, staging Pompeii’s final and catastrophic days. She recruited UCSD faculty, friends, actors, and others to pose as her characters. Her cast enacted various scenes, basking in the revelry of antiquity before Pompeii’s untimely demise. This dramatic vignette is inspired by the writer Petronius, a well-known figure in the court of Emperor Nero. Staged at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Antin uses the apt setting and effortlessly weaves together intricate narratives of historical past and present. The mural evokes a narrative of Rome through the style of English and French salon painting. Actors lie poolside, engaging in various leisurely pursuits as stunning green hills fade into infinity. Multiple vignettes sensually unfold across the scene as colorful, toga-clad actors engage in eating, drinking, playing music, and lounging while a lone acrobat in the background is captured mid-cartwheel. Dynamically scattered around the edges of the iconic fountain at the Salk Institute, the figures embody an air of aloofness reserved only for such indulgent pastimes. Honing in on La Jolla, Antin connects modern beachside living in Southern California to bayside living in ancient Pompeii, both epicenters of affluence.
Antin graduated from The City College of New York in 1958. Heading west to California in 1968, she taught at the University of California, Irvine. Subsequently, she became part of the early, foundational faculty of the visual arts program at the University of California, San Diego in the 1970s. Through performance, film, and installation, she has created an expansive body of work that examines contemporary culture and identity, expertly blurring the boundaries between various mediums.
Eleanor Antin’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the world. She has had solo exhibitions at many major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA); Whitney Museum, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work has been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, and Documenta 12. She is included in many major collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum; MoMA; Tate Modern, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Verbund Collection, Vienna. She has received many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 from the Women’s Caucus of the College Art Association, two Best Show International Association of Art Critics Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award, and an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Antin is represented by Richard Saltoun Gallery in London and Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York. She lives and works in San Diego.
40' x 36' 8"
Wall Sponsors: Maryanne and Irwin Pfister