Luther Price
Luther Price is an American experimental filmmaker and visual artist based in Boston, Massachusetts, known for his visceral and deeply personal works that explore themes of mortality, memory, and the body. He is celebrated for his altered slide works, in which he embeds organic materials such as insects, hair, and bodily fluids into 35mm slides, creating haunting, deteriorating images projected as performances. Price's practice bridges underground cinema and contemporary art, earning him a cult following and recognition in galleries and institutions internationally.
Artists in conversation
Jack Smith
Smith similarly worked in underground and experimental cinema with a visceral, transgressive sensibility that fused body imagery, decay, and deeply personal mythology into performative moving image works.
Mike Kelley
Kelley shared Price's preoccupation with abjection, repressed memory, and the body as a site of trauma, deploying found and organic materials to create deeply unsettling conceptual art.
Carolee Schneemann
Schneemann's work incorporated bodily materials and visceral imagery into experimental film and performance, exploring mortality and corporeality in ways that closely parallel Price's approach.
Artists who inspired them
Stan Brakhage
Brakhage pioneered the hand altered and materially manipulated film surface, directly embedding organic matter onto celluloid, a practice that profoundly shaped Price's own altered slide and film work.
Kenneth Anger
Anger's occult inflected underground cinema established a tradition of ritualistic, body centered experimental filmmaking that served as a key precedent for Price's dark and transgressive visual sensibility.
Francis Bacon
Bacon's distorted figurative painting of isolated and tortured bodies confronting mortality provided a visual and conceptual touchstone for Price's own fragmented and horrific renderings of the human form.