Mike and Doug Starn, American artists, born New Jersey 1961. Working collaboratively with photography since age 13, they defy categorization by effectively combining traditionally separate disciplines such as sculpture, painting, video, and installation. Their conceptual approach to photography has earned them a unique position in the history of contemporary art. The 1987 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial brought them international prominence. They since have had numerous survey solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide.

The U.S. pemier of Gravity of Light, one of the Starns' most ambitious exhibitions realized to date (commissioned by Färgfabriken Kunsthalle, Stockholm, Sweden, 2004) will be inaugurated fall 2008 at the Festival of Firsts (Pittsburgh, PA). Seven monumental photographs from the artists’ Absorption of Light visual lexicon will be lit by a blindingly bright carbon arc lamp center to the installation. This exhibition is scheduled to travel to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2009 (other venues will be announced).

December 2008, the Starns' first public commission will be unveiled at the South Ferry subway terminus (New York City). This permanent installation is over 250 feet in length, ranging from nine to fourteen feet in height. The artists interpreted their iconic photographs from Structure of Thought and Black Pulse into layered fused glass panels. This main element is punctuated by stone-mosaics from Structure of Thought and a 17th Century topographical map of Manhattan overlaid by a contemporary street grid-map, as well as a water-jet cut stainless steel fence.

Doug and Mike Starn are currently developing a series of unique gilded color carbon-prints, mingling photomicrographs of snow crystals they shot in the field, to the sculpture Guaynin, that they photographed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Critical essays and reviews of their work are regularly published in The New York Times, Art in America and ArtNews, amongst other international publications. Their major artworks are represented in more than 30 permanent public collections including the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYC), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Jewish Museum (NYC), La Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris, France), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), the National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Australia), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, South Korea), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), and the Yokohama Museum of Art (Yokohama, Japan).