Kevin McCoy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art Professions at NYU and a practicing artist working and exhibiting internationally with his partner Jennifer McCoy.
His artworks take many diverse forms including video sculpture and installation, photography, long-form film, curatorial practice and performance, kinetic sculpture and software-driven on-line projects. He has worked collaboratively with Jennifer McCoy for many years to try to answer what it means to speak together, often finding that experience outstrips available modes of presentation and discourse. To these ends their work has adopted many methodological approaches: exhaustive categorization, recreation and reenactment, automation, miniaturization, and most recently remote viewing and speculative modeling.
In New York City, his work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and many galleries. International exhibitions include projects at the Pompidou Center, the British Film Institute, ZKM, the Hanover Kunstverien, the Bonn Kunstverein, and F.A.C.T. (Liverpool, UK). Grants include a 2002 Creative Capital Grant for Emerging Fields, a 2005 Wired Rave Award, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. Articles about his work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, Art News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek. Residencies include work at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
His artwork is can be seen in the above New York institutions, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and MUDAM in Luxembourg and other museum and foundations
in 2022 he received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for his 2014 work “Monetized Graphics” which created the technical and social foundations for the development of what would later be known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
His teaching engages both undergraduate and graduate students in studio art and related arts professions and addresses practical and theoretical uses of digital media technology together with surveys of related theoretical and philosophical texts.