An Artist’s Life

History is fiction and personal identity nothing more than historical illusion: Eleanora Antinova is the renowned US contemporary artist Eleanor Antin - Eleanor Antin is Eleanora Antinova, a black American ballerina. Shifting the boundaries between art and life, An Artist’s Life publishes the exciting memoirs of Antinova found by Eleanor Antin.

The ballerina Eleanora Antinova could be called an artist of oblivion. Years ago, the contemporary artist and feminist Eleanor Antin discovered an unpublished manuscript of the ballerina's memoirs: the stories of her early modernist forgotten ballets, her romantic entanglements, and her friends at the glamorous Ballet Russe with its great maestro, Serge Diaghilev.

Generations later, Eleanor Antin lived for three weeks in New York as Antinova. Her journal of that time brings back the now forgotten ballerina. For the first time, this publication brings together the journal and the memoirs of Antin and Antinova, accompanied by a selection of photographs from the performances of the artists.