Monthly Archives: February 2016

Lisa Sigal have been painting on walls and making forms that combine painting with architecture. Utilizing this practice and expanding upon notions of space, her work investigates how art can challenge set ideas about property, structure, containment and freedom. Home Court Crawl, her Prospect 3 New Orleans biennial project was the inspiration for Blights Out, a collaborative and creative model for development that unites art, architecture, and organizing to share the tools for New Orleans residents to build the destinies of their own neighborhoods.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum’s Biennial 2008, The New Museum, MoMa/PS1 Museum, The Sculpture Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Albright Knox , the Brooklyn Museum, Prospect .3 International Biennial in New Orleans, the DeCordova Museum in Boston, the Essl Museum in Vienna, LAXART space in Los Angeles, Samson Projects in Boston among other venues. Sigal’s work is currently on view at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh thru the summer of 2016. She is a 2012 Art Matters Foundation grantee and Creative Capital grantee, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship awardee, a 2002 NYFA grantee and received the Joan MItchell Foundation Grant and the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in 1998. She received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1989. Sigal is currently co‐curating Open Sessions, at The Drawing Center. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

More about Lisa Sigal here

Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Professor Willis and has an affiliated appointment as University Professor with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies also at NYU. Professor Willis has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Fletcher, and MacArthur fellowships, the Infinity Award in Writing from the International Center for Photography, and recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award. Named one of the “100 Most Important People in Photography” by American Photography magazine she is one of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography and curators of African American culture. Willis’s books include Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, with Barbara Krauthamer, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, and many others.

Her newest book, Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty was released by the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Press, and a co-authored project, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, was released by Temple University Press. Among her other notable projects are Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers – 1840 to the Present, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and African American Portraits of Progress, The Black Female Body in Photography, Let Your Motto be Resistance, and Obama: the Historic Campaign in Photographs. This fall, Dr. Willis curated the traveling exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture, which was based on her book Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890’s to the Present and has been on tour in the United States for four years. Michelle Obama, The First Lady in Photographs received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography. Professor Willis lives in New York.

See more about Professor Willis here.

Drawing from her wide-ranging interests and research into subjects including literature, mythology, cinema, anthropology, evolutionary biology, religion and history, Camille Henrot’s work acutely reconsiders the typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian resulted in her film “Grosse Fatigue,” a benchmark work for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Developing on themes from the film, Henrot’s exhibition “The Pale Fox” was first shown at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2014 and travelled to Kunsthal Char¬lottenburg, Copenhagen, Bétonsalon, Paris, and the Westfällischer Kunstverein, Munster.

Henrot has forthcoming exhibitions scheduled at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Fon¬dazione Memmo, Rome. She has had one-person exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; New Orleans Museum of Art; Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris; and Jeu de Paume, Paris. She has exhibited in group shows at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; and SculptureCenter, New York. Camille Henrot participated in Prospect 3, New Orleans and the 2014 Taipei and Gwangju Biennials. She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam Jun Paik Award.

She speaks on Grosse Fatigue here.

Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009).