In 1979, after years of harassment and surveillance by the F.B.I., the American actress Jean Seberg committed suicide in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Margia Kramer, an artist living in New York City, submitted a request for Seberg’s F.B.I. file under the Freedom of Information Act.
That file was the basis of “Secret I,” Ms. Kramer’s 1980 exhibition at Artists Space in TriBeCa. A series of installations followed, including “Jean Seberg/The FBI/The Media,” a show at the Museum of Modern Art that included a 20-minute video, enlarged negative photostats on transparent film of pages from the F.B.I. file, newspaper and magazine articles, two series of Seberg’s films, with speakers, and a panel including Amiri Baraka, at the Carnegie Hall Cinema and the Donnell Library.
Ms. Kramer divides her time between her house in Sag Harbor, which she bought in 2001, and the SoHo loft of her longtime partner, Rudy Serra, a sculptor who works in clay.
She created installations throughout the ’80s that drew on declassified F.B.I. files, ranging from Seberg’s to those of Vietnam War resisters, to Andy Warhol’s, as well as exhibitions based on C.I.A. flyers such as “How to be a Spy” and declassified C.I.A. files relating to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
Speaking of her ’80s installations, Ms. Kramer said, “My work from that period is important now because of what has been called surveillance capitalism and because of the weaponization of information. Trying to get government information, looking at original documents, verifying the truthfulness and accuracy of information, holding the government accountable, and protecting privacy are very, very important at this point in time.”
While political content has continued to engage Ms. Kramer over the years, it has more recently taken the form of writing rather than visual work. However, last spring, Peter Scott of Carriage Trade, a gallery on the Lower East Side, learned about her work on Seberg and asked if the entire pamphlet from “Secret I” could be reproduced as a large-scale print for a group exhibition there. That show, “The Village,” investigated parallels between the fictional control society of the ’60s television show “The Prisoner” and contemporary modes of surveillance.
Stephan Pascher, an artist and writer, saw Ms. Kramer’s piece at Carriage Trade and arranged for a copy of the same print to be included in “News, Inc.,” a show of political art that has been on view at the Galería Moisés Pérez de Albéniz in Madrid; it runs through Sunday.
Not only have technological developments of the past 40 years made issues of surveillance and privacy more critical than ever, the release last week of the feature film “Seberg,” starring Kristin Stewart in the title role, has returned the actress’s activism and the F.B.I.’s attack on her to the public consciousness.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Ms. Kramer decided by the seventh grade that she would be an artist. She studied figure drawing at the Art Students League when she was 13 and continued to commute there through high school.
At Brooklyn College, where she studied with Ad Reinhardt, Kurt Seligmann, and Burgoyne Diller, she earned a degree in studio art. “Mondrian was a big influence there, and the work I was doing was influenced by neo-plasticism and, to a lesser degree, surrealism.”
In 1961 she married David Hupert. They lived in Alfred, N.Y., where he was teaching art history, from 1963 to 1966. They have two children, Naomi, a research scientist, and Nathaniel, a doctor, and four grandchildren.
At Reinhardt’s suggestion, Ms. Kramer went on to earn a master’s degree in art history in 1966 at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. That same year she was hired as a lecturer at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She suggested her husband apply for a job there, and he was hired to head the education department, though she herself had to resign because of the museum’s policy on nepotism.
She taught art history and studio art at various institutions, among them Hunter College, Pratt Institute, Sarah Lawrence, and Duke University. During the late ’60s she became involved with avant-garde dance, performing with Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, and Trisha Brown.
In the years that followed, Ms. Kramer began soaking and staining large unstretched canvases before pressing them against wooden stretchers. When the canvases dried and shrank, they retained the impressions of the stretchers. “They were a little like reliefs,” she said. “I stained them in a kind of Frankenthaler way, but in patterns, which were more like Japanese art. So, I decided I had to go to Japan.”
A turning point in the artist’s creative approach was triggered by an unexpected job offer. Because somebody in the State Department had quit suddenly, the U.S. Information Agency, knowing that Ms. Kramer had spent six weeks on her own in Japan, asked if she would accompany a Pop Art exhibition to Romania.
She spent about five months there. In addition to traveling with the show, she organized related programs, demonstrated new art materials to Romanian artists, and was given the curious assignment of retouching paintings of Nicolae Ceaucescu, Romania’s dictator from 1965 until his overthrow and execution in 1989.
“While there I was under surveillance all the time,” she said. “So I experienced a dictatorship, a really bad authoritarian government.” It was while working at the American Embassy that she learned about the Freedom of Information Act.
“Folk art and folklore were important in Romania, and I started to think of art as a kind of anthropological experience, as communication, as cultural in a broader sense, and as investigative reporting. I began to change my view of what art was for me.” Then, during a two-week stay in Paris on her way back to the United States, Seberg killed herself.
Because of the actress’s support of the Black Panther Party and other leftist organizations, she had become a target of F.B.I. surveillance and harassment. In 1970, the bureau created a false story — one of many F.B.I. disinformation campaigns — that the child Seberg was carrying was fathered not by her husband, the writer Romain Gary, but by a Black Panther. The story appeared in The Los Angeles Times and Newsweek magazine, without any reference to the F.B.I. as its source.
Ms. Seberg went into premature labor, and her baby died two days later. The funeral was held in the actress’s hometown with an open casket, which allowed reporters to see the infant’s white skin and refuted the rumors. The story of government surveillance and harassment became the theme of the cycle of installations created by Ms. Kramer over the following decade.
“While working for the U.S.I.A. in Romania, we took the exhibition to four different locations, we had pamphlets, panel discussions, and did a lot of outreach. I decided I would do my work that way, too.” Her first show after Romania was “Secret I.”
That installation could only be entered by climbing a ladder onto a platform. From there, one could look down at the floor, which was covered with colored gravel that spelled out words: the words Seberg had said to The New York Times about her child’s funeral. Near the doorway into the room was a table with some of the essential, declassified F.B.I. documents, complete with redactions.
Ms. Kramer subsequently did Seberg-related window installations at Printed Matter and Franklin Furnace in New York, as well as installations at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and Artemesia Gallery in Chicago.
In the ’80s, she completed three videotapes that she called “Freedom of Information Tapes.” They included “Jean Seberg,” “Progress and Access,” and “The CIA’s Guerrilla Manual for the Contras in Nicaragua.” She went on to create video installations about the new personal computers, access to information, and the “World Wide Web,” as the internet was first known.
These culminated in a video installation in 1984 at the Whitney Museum. In 1989, while artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ms. Kramer installed “Looking at Militarism.” A video installation and library that filled an entire gallery, it represented Ronald Reagan’s inflated military budget alongside the history of M.I.T.’s contributions to military technology.
