Rachel Stern – Columbia MFA VALS

James Bidgood: Tuesday March 22nd

VALS Spring 2016

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: Tuesday March 8th

VALS Spring 2016

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.

Tuesday February 23rd: Deb Willis

VALS Spring 2016

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.

Tuesday February 2nd: Shelly Silver

VALS Spring 2016

Shelly Silver is a New York based artist working with the still and moving image. Her work explores contested territories between public and private, narrative and documentary, and–increasingly in recent years–the watcher and the watched. She has exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Yokohama Museum, the London ICA, and the London, the Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin Film Festivals. Silver has received fellowships and grants from organizations such as the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman. Her films have been broadcast by BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte/Germany, France, Planete/Europe, RTE/ Ireland, SWR/Germany, and Atenor/Spain, among others, and she has been a fellow at the DAAD Artists Program in Berlin, the Japan/US Artist Program in Tokyo, Cité des Arts in Paris, and at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Silver is Associate Professor and Chair of the Visual Arts Program, School of the Arts, Columbia University.

More information here.

Tuesday December 1st: Nayland Blake

VALS Fall 2015

Interracial desire, same-sex love, and racial and sexual bigotry are recurrent themes in Nayland Blake’s sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, which reflect his preoccupation with his own racial and sexual identities. Blake explores ideas about whiteness and blackness, not only as they relate to race, but as skin itself and how that skin determines one’s identity. Blake, whose mother is white and father is black, work has often dealt with role-playing (puppets and theatricality and sado-masochism) and asks questions about the search for identity and the notion of passing for something you are not. The exaggerated role-playing and costumes of sado-masochism and drag are for Blake another type of “skin.” The bunny is a recurring theme for Blake as he expands on the rabbit and hare’s traditional portrayal as symbols of lust and fecundity. Blake’s “rabbit” has evolved into the artist’s iconographic surrogate for gay men (playing off the stereotype of the promiscuous gay man) as well as a threshold figure for black/white and male/female. Many works incorporate bunny suits that the the artist constructs for himself, such as, Starting Over (2000) is a video projection that depicts Blake wearing a bunny suit lined with weights that match his boyfriend’s total body weight and feverishly tap dancing–the weights affecting each movement, sometimes moving in tandem with Blake’s body and sometimes imposing constraints.

Blake has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and his work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale. Survey exhibitions of his work have been presented by the Center for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland in College Park, Tang Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and Location One in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco, Henry Art Gallery at University of Washington in Seattle, Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California. HIs works have been included in group exhibitions at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, New Museum in New York, Institute of Contemporary Photography in New York, Artists Space in New York, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, Tate Liverpool, and Center for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, among many other venues.

See more of his work here.

Tuesday November 24th: Nancy Lupo

VALS Fall 2015

Nancy Lupo (b. 1983, Flagstaff, AZ, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received a BFA from The Cooper Union and a MFA from Yale University School of Art. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013 and is a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent exhibitions include Old Zoo Food, LAXART, Los Angeles (2014) and Taster’s Choice – curated by Christopher Y. Lew, MoMA PS1 (2014). Her work is currently included in A New Rhythm, Park View, Los Angeles and Apple of Earth, High Art, Paris. She will have a solo presentation in the Art Statements section of Art Basel in June. This is her first one-person exhibition at Wallspace.

See more of her work here.

Tuesday November 10th: Matthew Barney

VALS Fall 2015

Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 and raised in Boise, Idaho. He attended Yale University, receiving his BA in 1989, then moved to New York City, where he lives today. From his earliest work, Barney has explored the transcendence of physical limitations in a multimedia art practice that incorporates feature-length films, video installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing.

In 2002 Barney completed the CREMASTER Cycle, a five-part film begun in 1994. The Cycle, along with related sculptures, photographs, and drawings, was the subject of a 2002 retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and traveling to Museum Ludwig, Cologne and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. His ongoing series DRAWING RESTRAINT has been the subject of exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Serpentine Gallery, London; Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. Barney’s most recent project is RIVER OF FUNDAMENT, an operatic film made with composer Jonathan Bepler. A solo exhibition of related sculptures, drawings and storyboards, opened at Haus der Kunst Munich, 2014; traveled to the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania in November of that year; and is now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles through January of next year.

Barney has received numerous awards including the Aperto prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale; the Hugo Boss Award in 1996; the 2007 Kaiser Ring Award in Goslar, Germany and the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Persistence of Vision Award in 2011.

Thursday October 22nd: Zackary Drucker

VALS Fall 2015

Zackary Drucker is an independent artist, cultural producer, and trans woman who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MOMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, among others. She is a Co-Producer on Transparent.

See more of her work here.

Tuesday October 6th: Michael Bühler-Rose

VALS Fall 2015

Michael Bühler-Rose’s received his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and his MFA from the University of Florida, Gainesville (2008). He is an Instructor at both the Rhode Island School of Design and at Cooper Union, as well as a purohita (Hindu priest), and his work on these platforms influence his artistic production. His study and practice of Vaishnavism, Sanskrit, kalpa (ritual), and philosophy over the last 20 years have prompted extended stays in India, including one as a Fulbright Fellow. In his photographs, videos and installations he explores the relationship between the art object and the artist as a parallel to a venerated deity and a priest, and aesthetic experience as ultimately religious. Bühler-Rose has exhibited work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, Delhi; Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Cambridge; Witte De With, Rotterdam, and the Everson Museum, Syracuse.