Nora Ligorano met Marshall Reese in 1977 while studying painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
In New York, both of them continued working in performance art and video expanding into other media including installations, artists books and limited edition multiples.
The centerpiece of the installation is a magnifying glass on a pedestal with a primary lens that miniaturizes Hollywood war films to fit on the head of a pin.
[5] With funding from NYSCA and the Jerome Foundation in 2003 they started research and development on illuminating woven fiber optic thread.
In 2009 while residents at Eyebeam,[6] LigoranoReese met Luke Loeffler and devised programming with him for the fabric to respond to live information from the internet.
'In 2006, on the third anniversary of the Iraq War, the artists installed the word Democracy sculpted from 2000 pounds of ice in the garden of Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York City.
[10] In October that same year, the artists installed an ice sculpture of the word Economy on the 79th Anniversary of the Great Depression in front of the New York State Supreme Court Building at Foley Square.
[11] In 2010 LigoranoReese made an ice sculpture of the words Middle Class and filmed it disappearing in Kempner's garden called Morning In America.
[13] The artists installed the ice sculpture Dawn of the Anthropocene in New York City in front of the Flatiron Building as part of the People's Climate March on September 21, 2014.
The poet/writer Charles Bernstein writes, “The fundamental feature of LigoranoReese's ice sculptures is that they start out as massive objects, weighing two tons, but by the end of the day they are no more than memories.
Johanna Drucker commented on their installation The Corona Palimpsest:[17] The current tension of the book reflects the present tense of electronic media continuing to come into being.
LigoranoReese began making artists books and limited edition multiples in 1992 with the Bible Belt as an element of a room-size installation with the same name.
After the artists mailed pairs of the underwear to political leaders in Washington as gifts, they were sued by the Republican National Committee to cease and desist citing trademark infringement.