b. 1981 Boston, Massachusetts

Liz Glynn’s sculptures and performances often make reference to classical antiquity in order to explore contemporary culture as both a legacy and an imperfect mirror of the crumbled empires of the past. She is particularly concerned with ruins: how they reflect the hubris of claims to permanence and rational systems, as well as how they provide an opening for recycling, recuperation, and transformation. For her performance The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, or, Building Rome in a Day (2008), Glynn and a group of collaborators enact the history of Rome: from Romulus and Remus to the rampaging Visigoths, using salvaged building supplies to construct, and then destroy, a scale model of the city. By packing Rome’s august and tragic history into a twenty-four-hour time span, Glynn both emphasizes the fleeting nature of humanity’s grandest projects, and optimistically asserts the possibility of the seemingly impossible task of building Rome in a day.