Monthly Archives: March 2016

David Salle helped define the post-modern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MoMA Vienna; Menil Collection, Houston; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Castello di Rivoli; and the Guggenheim, Bilbao.

Although known primarily as a painter, Salle’s work grows out of a long-standing involvement with performance. Over the last 25 years he has worked extensively with choreographer Karole Armitage, creating sets and costumes for many of her ballets and operas. Their collaborations have been staged at venues throughout Europe and America, including The Metropolitan Opera House; The Paris Opera; The Opera Comique; Lyon Opera; Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Opera Deutsche, Berlin. In 1995, Salle directed the feature film Search and Destroy, starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken.
Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, and Arts Magazine, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He is a regular contributor for Town & Country Magazine. How to See, a volume of Salle’s collected essays, will be published by W.W. Norton in Fall, 2016.

Rashid Johnson (b. 1977) produces conceptual post-black art, in wide ranging forms from photos to audio to video to sculpture. He is known for both his unusual artistic productions and for his process, often combining various scientific techniques with black history so that his materials, which are formally independent, are augmented by their relation to black history.

He earned a BA in photography from Columbia College in Chicago in 2000, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Institute of Chicago; High Museum, Atlanta; and the Miami Art Museum; among many others. Recent solo exhibitions include Message to Our Folks, MCA Chicago, Illinois, USA, touring (2012); Shelter, South London Gallery, UK (2012); New Growth, Ballroom Marfa, Texas, USA, touring (2013); Three Rooms, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland (2014); Magic Numbers, The George Economou Collection, Athens, Greece (2014); and Anxious Men, The Drawing Center, New York, USA (forthcoming, 2015). Recent group exhibitions have taken place at the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, NC, USA (2011); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA (2011); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2011); Shanghai Biennale, China (2012); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA (2012); and MAMBo Bologna, Italy (2012).

For three decades Dread Scott has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering norms of American society. In 1989, the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed one of his artworks and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its use of the American flag. His art has been exhibited/performed at MoMA/PS1, Pori Art Museum (Finland), BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and galleries and street corners across the country.  He is a recipient of grants form Creative Capital Foundation and the Pollock Krasner Foundation and his work is included in the collection of the Whitney Museum.

James Bidgood is an oft unsung great queer image maker famed for his film “Pink Narcissus” (1971). Born in 1933 in Madison, Wisconsin he moved to New York City as a young man. In New York he performed in drag and as a male dancer in nightclubs, namely the infamous Club 82. In the late 1950’s he attended the Parson’s School of Design and worked afterwards as a window dresser, set dresser, and fashion designer. He began to use the props and costumes he made commercially in the production of his own homoerotic imagery and form 1963 – 1967 his photographs were published in a range of Physique magazines, namely The Young Physique, Muscleboy, Demi-Gods, and Muscle Teens. From 1964 – 1969 he made his seminal film “Pink Narcissus” starring Bobby Kendall and released in 1971 under the name ‘Anonymous.’ Bidgood lives and works in New York City.

More about James Bidgood here.

Brian Bress (b. 1975 in Norfolk, Virginia) is an American video artist living and working in Los Angeles. Bress received a BFA in film, animation and Video from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island in 1998, an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine in 2007. In 2012 Bress’s video piece “Status Report” was exhibited at the New Museum in New York City as part of their “Stowaway Series”. Also in 2012 Bress showed five “video portraits” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in an exhibition entitled “Interventions”. In 2013 Bress’ piece “Idiom (Brian, Raffi, Britt)” was exhibited in the Stark Bar at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In that same year he also had self titled solo exhibitions at the Museo d’arte Contemporanea Roma in Rome, Italy and at the Galeria Marta Cevera in Madrid, Spain. Bress’ exhibition “Make Your Own Friends” just closed at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The show then traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver opening in January 2016. Bress is also known for his work with the Pet Shop Boys. In 2012 he directed the video for the duos sing “Invisible” from their “Elysium” release.

See more about Brian Bress here.