EVENT: Conversation Among Friends / New York / July 21, 2014

Images: Adrienne Edwards, 2013. Photo by Whitney Browne; Adam Pendleton, 2012. Photo by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Courtesy Pace Gallery.

Featuring artist Adam Pendleton and Adrienne Edwards, Associate Curator, Performa

Monday, July 21, 2014

7:00 p.m. program | 8:15 p.m. reception

Doors open at 6:45 p.m.

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Celeste Bartos Theater (Theater 3)

The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building

4 West 54^th Street

New York, NY

GENERAL ADMISSION TICKETS ($35), MEMBER TICKETS ($20) MAY BE PURCHASED AT THE MUSEUM INFORMATION AND FILM DESKS, ONLINE AT MOMA.ORG, OR THROUGH THE FRIENDS OF EDUCATION OFFICE.

ALL TICKETS WILL BE HELD AT DOOR.

Presented by The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art as part of the series Conversations: Among Friends, this event features a conversation between artist Adam Pendleton and curator, scholar, and writer Adrienne Edwards. Following the program, guests are invited to continue the conversation and meet the participants at an intimate reception catered by Fantasy Fare in the Cullman Mezzanine.

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a Conceptual artist known for his multidisciplinary practice, which moves fluidly between painting, publishing, photographic collage, video, and performance. His work centers on an engagement with language, in both the figurative and literal senses, and the re-contextualization of history through appropriated imagery in order to establish alternative interpretations of the present and, as the artist has explained, “a future dynamic where new historical narratives and meanings can exist.” Pendleton has been included in significant exhibitions in America and Europe, includingLove Story – The Anne & Wolfgang Titze Collection, Winter Palace and 21er Haus, Belvedere, Vienna (2014); La Triennale, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language, MoMA, New York (2012); Greater New York 2010, MoMA PS1, New York (2010); The Generational: Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2010); Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool (2010); Manifesta 7, Trentino-South Tyrol, Italy (2008); After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2008); Object, The Undeniable Success of Operations, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2008); Manifesto Marathon, The Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007); Performa 07, New York (2007);Talk Show, ICA, London (2007); Resistance Is, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2007); Frequency, The Studio Museum of Harlem (2005–06); and Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since the 1970s, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005).

Adrienne Edwards is a curator, scholar, and writer of performance with a focus on artists of the African diaspora and the Global South. She is an associate curator at Performa and a PhD candidate in performance studies at New York University, where she is a Corrigan Doctoral Fellow. Edwards’s research interpolates visual and time-based art, experimental dance, critical race theory, feminist theory, and post-structuralist philosophy. She has curated and co-organized numerous performance art projects, including Rashid Johnson's first live work, Dutchman; Dave McKenzie's All the King's horses...none of his men; Clifford Owens's Five Days Worth; Fluxus founding member Benjamin Patterson's first retrospective concert Action as Composition; and Pope.L's Cage Unrequited; among others. Edwards is a contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues and art publications—including Clifford Owens: Anthology, for MoMA/PS1, Performa, 11 for Performa, Fore, for the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Wangechi Mutu, for the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney—and is performance reviews editor for the journal of feminist theory Women & Performance.

Event Link

EVENT: Conversations Among Friends / New York / April 4, 2014

Featuring Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, and Salamishah Tillet

Moderated by Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA

Friday, April 4, 2014

7:00 pm program | 8:15 pm reception

Doors open at 6:45 pm

The Museum of modern art

The Celeste Bartos Theater (Theater 3)

The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building

4 West 54^th Street

New York, NY

General Admission tickets ($35), Member Tickets ($20) may be purchased at The Museum information and film desks, online at MoMA.org, or through the Friends of Education Office.

All tickets will be held at the door.

Presented by The Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art as part of the series Conversations: Among Friends, this evening's program features a conversation between artists Deana Lawson and Lyle Ashton Harris, and scholar and author Salamishah Tillet, moderated by Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA. Following the program, guests are invited to continue the conversation and meet the participants at an intimate reception catered by Fantasy Fare in The Cullman Mezzanine.

For more than two decades Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic practice including photographic media, collage, installation, and performance. His work explores intersections between the personal and the political, examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on contemporary social and cultural dynamics. Known for his self-portraits and use of pop culture icons (such as Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson), Harris teases the viewers’ perceptions and expectations, signifying cultural cursors, and recalibrating the familiar with the extraordinary. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the 52nd Venice Biennale. His work has been acquired by major international museums, most recently by The Museum of Modern Art in New York. His commissioned work has been featured in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. In 2014 Harris joined the board of trustees of the American Academy in Rome. Born in New York City, Harris spent his formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He received his bachelor of arts with honors from Wesleyan University in 1988, and his masters in fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 1990. He currently lives and works in New York City and is an associate professor at New York University.

Deana Lawson is a photography-based artist born in Rochester, NY. She received her MFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design in 2004, and currently teaches photography at Princeton University. Her work examines the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing themes of familial legacy, community, romance, and religious/spiritual aesthetics. Her practice borrows from simultaneous visual traditions, including photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and vernacular family-album photographs. Lawson is visually inspired by the materiality of black culture and its expression as seen through the body and in domestic environments. Lace curtains, artificial nails, blemished skin, colored weave, and plastic couch covers are examples of visual material that Lawson identifies and heightens in her pictures. Careful attention is given to lighting and pose, both formal constructs used to transform, inform, and intensify representations of power and liberation through personal and intimate space. Lawson meets her subjects in everyday walks of life: grocery stores; subway trains; busy avenues in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn; road trips taken to the deep south; and travel abroad to the West Indies and beyond. Exhibitions include Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; MoMA, New York; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; Helene Bailly Gallery, Paris; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Kunst im Tunnel in Düsseldorf, Germany; Light Work, Syracuse, New York; Cohan & Leslie, New York; Collette Blanchard Gallery, New York; Artists Space, New York; The Print Center, Philadelphia; and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta. Lawson is the recipient of the Art Matters Grant, John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, and a NYFA Grant. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The Collector's Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2, Time Out New York, Contact Sheet #154, and PQ Journal for Contemporary Photography Volume 24. Lawson has participated in residencies including Workspace Residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York; Light Work in Syracuse, New York; and Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY

As a rape survivor, scholar, and writer, Dr. Salamishah Tillet has spent her career championing the rights and voices of our most vulnerable citizens. Nominated by Glamour magazine as a “Women of the Year,” named as one of the “Top 50 Global Leaders Ending Violence Against Children” by the Together for Girls’ Safe magazine, and America’s “Top Leaders Under 30” by Ebony, she has appeared on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR, written for The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and The Root, and guest blogs for The Nation. Currently, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and has faculty appointments in the departments of Africana studies, and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. In 2003, Tillet and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, co-founded A Long Walk Home, Inc., a non-profit that uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to end violence against all girls and women. Tillet was also an associate producer of Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s groundbreaking NO! The Rape Documentary, and was featured in the award-winning Rape Is... by Cambridge Documentary Films. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke University Press, 2012). In 2011, she wrote the liner notes for the three-time Grammy-award winning album Wake Up! by John Legend and The Roots. In 2013, she published Gloria Steinem: The Kindle Singles Interview with Amazon, and she is currently working on a book on the Civil Rights icon, Nina Simone. She earned her PhD in the history of American civilization and AM in English and American literature from Harvard University, and her MA in teaching from Brown University. She also holds a BA in English and African American studies from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2010, she was awarded the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2010–11, she was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellow for Career Enhancement and served as a visiting fellow at the Center of African American Studies at Princeton University. In 2013–14, she was invited to be an inaugural member of the Project of the Advancement of Our Common Humanity, a think tank at New York University. She is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.  

Lucy Gallun is assistant curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, where her upcoming projects include an exhibition of photographs from the Shunk-Kender Photography Collection, as well as the next iteration of MoMA’s New Photography exhibition series (both 2015). At MoMA, Gallun has worked on numerous exhibitions including Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960 (2011); Boris Mikhailov: Case History (2011); Cindy Sherman (2012); The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook (2012–13); A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio (2014); and Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness (upcoming 2014). Prior to coming to MoMA, she was the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she curated the exhibitions Everyday Imaginary (2010) and Erin Shirreff: Still, Flat, and Far (2010); and she was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP), where she co-curated the exhibition Time Out of Joint: Recall and Evocation in Recent Art, at The Kitchen, New York (2009). Gallun has also served as associate publisher at Gregory R. Miller & Co. She holds a BA in art history and urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Phil in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Event Link

PANEL DISCUSSION: Looking at the Black Male Nude in Art

In conjunction with the exhibit Jean-Michel Basquiat Reclining Nude:Photographs by Paige Powell

Saturday, February 22, 2014, 6:00PM

SUZANNE GEISS COMPANY

76 Grand Street

New York, NY

PANELISTS:

MICHELA ANGELA DAVIS

ELISE GALLANT

NELSON GEORGE

KALUP LINZY

XAVIERA SIMMONS

RSVP required, contact gallery for details

Phone: 212.625.8130

Email: info@suzannegeiss.com

SYMPOSIUM + BOOK LAUNCH: Black Is, Black Ain’t

Featuring Huey Copeland, Thelma Golden, Kellie Jones, Bennett Simpson, and Hamza Walker

Sunday, December 8, 2013, 2PM

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Kent Hall, Room 107

1020 East 58^th Street

Chicago, IL

Symposium:

On the occasion of publishing the Black Is, Black Ain’t exhibition catalog, the Renaissance Society has organized a symposium revisiting issues raised in the exhibition of the same name, curated by Hamza Walker and shown at the Society in 2008. Given the extent to which race is bound to visual representation, exhibitions have played no small role in instigating discussion. They are where identity has been asserted, critiqued, and dismantled, all in a healthy circular fashion. This symposium’s cast of curators, critics, and scholars will reflect on a series of seminal exhibitions from Black Male (1994) through Blues for Smoke (2012) and the context in which they were mounted, from the riots ensuing in the wake of the Rodney King beating to Obama’s presidential election.

Panelists:

Huey Copeland, moderator, Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University

Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem

Kellie Jones, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University

Bennett Simpson, Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles

Hamza Walker, Associate Curator and Director of Education at the Renaissance Society

Publication:

Black Is, Black Ain’t is a generously illustrated, 196 page exhibition catalog documenting work by 26 artists and featuring essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy Mooney, Kym Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warren. This group exhibition, curated by Hamza Walker, explored an evolution in the discourse of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a recent shift to racial identity being simultaneously rejected and retained.

Black Is, Black Ain’t was first exhibited at the Renaissance Society, then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2009) and the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute (2009).

Symposium Link

RECAP: Black Artists Head to [B.A.R.] for a Think

Image via blackartistsretreat.com.

On August 22 and 23, 2013, Theaster Gates hosted a private event called The Black Artists Retreat in Chicago. Posted here are the contents of an electronic message which recapped the event:

Date: August 30, 2013, 3:18:16 PM CDT

To: undisclosed-recipients

Subject: [B.A.R.] Looking Forward and Thanks!

Dearest, 

One week ago we were flush with preparations to welcome you all here in Chicago for the Black Artists Retreat. Nearly 100 artists, creatives, and supporters gathered to begin an important conversation about the state of the arts, collaboration, and responsibility. 

Candida Alvarez shared a favorite Langston Hughes passage on Thursday night reminding us to laugh and Kerry James Marshall remarked that although often in studio solitude we are not islands; this kind of coming together is critical. On Friday the historical yet prescient, text The Black Artist in America: A Symposium was dramatized and we were began to establish a baseline from which to move forward.  

The transcript from 1969 may have held more similarities to 2013 than we would have imagined but let us read Mr. Gilliam's words once more, pg 254:

      We're necessarily speaking of a job for the future. We've been few in number; the injustice of the whole social situation has made it so that we are few in number. We need not only to develop Black craftsmen, but also Black historians, Black critics. We need more Black-owned art galleries: let's talk about  moving into business-art is a business. This a thing that concerns us. If we're looking for ways art- or black art- can be developed within a community, then  let's talk about all the things that are really necessary to develop it.

We convened, we dance, we ate, we drank and we started something. We will be taking the next few weeks to gather information and responses from the retreat to shift the www.blackartistsretreat.com website into a platform that allows us, and others who could not join, to interact prior to next gatherings. 

We have attached the group photo from Friday afternoon-what a beautiful bunch of people you all are!

In addition to the virtual communications we have had and will have, if you have not provided us your postal address, please do so here: www.postable.com/blackartistsretreat

Thank you all for participating in such a rare and special moment!

Take care,

eliza and Marlease

[B.A.R.] Stewards

PANEL DISCUSSION: It's Bigger Than Hip Hop / Hagedorn Foundation Gallery / Atlanta, GA / July 9, 2011

Hagedorn Foundation Gallery

Fahamu Pecou Overview of Discussion