Marc Horowitz (American, b. 1976) is a Los Angeles-based artist working across painting, sculpture, video, performance and social practice. He built an early career on internet-based performances that blurred art and entertainment, and is credited among the first visual artists to sign with an entertainment agency. Since the mid-2010s his practice has centered on paintings that layer contemporary imagery and small trickster figures over reproductions of old master compositions.
Horowitz studied at the San Francisco Art Institute under the social-practice artists Harrell Fletcher and Jon Rubin, whose community-based projects steered him from studio painting toward public performance. In 2004 he wrote his phone number on a dry-erase board during a Crate and Barrel catalog shoot. Tens of thousands of calls followed, and he spent the next year driving across the United States eating dinner with strangers who phoned, as The National Dinner Tour. The project brought him representation by the William Morris Agency. In 2010 Creative Time commissioned The Advice of Strangers, a month-long project in which Horowitz let an online audience vote on decisions in his daily life, from what he wore to whether he should visit his father's grave to make amends. He has described the experience as traumatic and identifies it as the start of his retreat from internet-based work.
