Alexandra Grant

Grant met actor Keanu Reeves at a social event in 2009, beginning a creative partnership that produced the books Ode to Happiness and Shadows. Grant and Reeves have been partners since around 2018, and they made their relationship public at the LACMA Art + Film Gala in November 2019.

Grant is also friends with actress Jennifer Tilly, who discussed Grant and Reeves's relationship in connection with its public profile.

Literature and the experience of reading have been central to Grant's artistic practice. She transforms words, phrases, and written texts into visual forms, using painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and installations to explore how language carries emotion and meaning.

Grant's long-running collaboration with hypertext-fiction writer Michael Joyce produced works based on his texts, including the series Ladder Quartet, Six Portals, and Bodies. She treats writers' texts as scores or scripts, interpreting and transforming them through visual composition rather than illustrating them directly.

Grant held her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007. Her later exhibitions included Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest, created with writer Hélène Cixous in 2013, and the participatory project ghost town, developed with poet Vania Vargas for the 20th Bienal de Arte Paiz in 2016.

Her Antigone 3000 series draws on the Greek myth of Antigone and Sophocles's line, “I was born to love not to hate.” Grant received the City of Los Angeles Mid-Career Artist Award in 2015, and works from the series were later shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2017, she created the community-based installation Antigone is you is me with her sister, Florence Grant.

Grant collaborated with Reeves on Ode to Happiness, published in 2011, and Shadows, released in 2016 with photographs by Grant. In 2017, Grant, Reeves, and designer Jessica Fleischmann established X Artists' Books, an independent publishing company focused on works by artists and writers. Grant's publications also include The Artists' Prison and the exhibition catalog Forêt intérieure = Interior forest.

During a 2015 residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Grant directed Taking Lena Home, a documentary about returning a stolen tombstone to rural Nebraska.

Grant's grantLOVE project supports arts and community organizations through artist-owned projects and sales of works featuring the LOVE symbol. Organizations connected with the project have included Heart of Los Angeles Visual Arts and X-TRA Contemporary Arts Journal.

In 2008, Grant joined the Watts House Project and proposed transforming the Moneik Johnson family's home in Watts, Los Angeles, into a functional public artwork called the Love House. Through grantLOVE, she produced and sold LOVE jewelry to help raise funds for the renovation.