Quotes from Aleksandra Mir

I wanted to contribute to the landscape tradition in art. By now I guess we are comfortable with the thought that man has been everywhere or affected everything in nature.

The moment right now, it's a tragically regressive time we live in, you know. We just grounded the Concorde. Where's the future? We've lost the future.

Seeing your work go into storage in an art museum is obviously a tragedy of any cultural product - which doesn't mean I am anti-institutional.

I follow these intimate connections of strangers and, surprise!, end up finding even myself in the work at some point.

I'm neither shy nor impressed by media and press. It's just another industry to me. My response to the criticism was, "I work with a steel factory. Why can't I work with the media?"

I'm depending on other people to take the work and run. And if they run in so many directions, they sort of cancel each other out. So the meaning is always open.

Really the moment I decided I wanted to do art seriously, I left art school. I wanted to be with people who were interested in the same things I was: popular culture.

In 1989 I came to New York to go to the School of Visual Arts. Then, after two years, I switched over to the New School for Social Research and did cultural anthropology in the graduate school there.