Michael Zansky (born 1947, in the Bronx, New York) is an American artist working in installation art, sculpture, painting and photography. Early life Michael Zansky was born in 1947 in the Tremont section the Bronx, into the family of Louis Zansky, a noted comic book illustrator. After graduating from New York City's High School of Music and Art, Zansky entered Boston University, Boston, MA, where he graduated in 1969. While attending Boston University, he heard lectures by Philip Guston. At Hunter College in New York, Zansky studied with Robert Morris and John McCracken. Career Fine artist Zansky's cycle History as Ruin, which began in 1992 with an exhibition at Berry-Hill Galleries, Exit Art and the Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, consists largely of 200 individually carved and painted 4 X 8 foot wooden reliefs and freestanding sculptures. In a catalog essay by Donald Kuspit, he states: “There is nothing like Zansky’s work in modern art, certainly not in contemporary art. It holds its own with Goya’s “Quinta del Sordo” paintings, and extends their fantasy into more irrational terra incognita than Goya ever imagined in his worst dreams.” In 1994, Zansky began a series of works collectively titled Traces. For the catalog essay on Zansky’s solo show at Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York, NY, Thomas McEvilley wrote: “Zansky’s work participates in a common thematics of the post-Modern moment – a reconsideration of the relationship between nature and culture. In the Modernist period these forces had been regarded as rigorously separate and indeed antithetical. The triumph of culture would consist precisely in its domination of nature: the triumph of nature in turn would be its erosion of culture back into the primeval swamp. Zansky’s work goes beyond this dichotomy in directions pointed in the art discourse by such seminal proto-post-Modernists as Robert Smithson and Joseph Beuys. For Zansky, as for both of these artists, it is the natural resolution of civilization that it should dissolve into the swamp again, and the natural expression of the swamp that it should contain a life force always ready to sprout anew.” Optics became an important element in Zansky's art starting with a series titled Still in Motion (2003), which was a precursor for the series The American Panopticon. Bradley Rubenstein wrote in ARCO Madrid 2005 catalog when describing Zansky's lens installation The American Panopticon: “Astolphe de Custine, writing about the late 19th century Czarist Russia,