VALS Spring 2016

Michael Berryhill (b. 1972 El Paso, TX) received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin and his MFA from Columbia University, New York; he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007. Recent exhibitions include Lulu, Mexico City; Fredericks & Freiser, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City; KANSAS, New York; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Blütenweiss Gallery, Berlin; Okay Mountain and Arthouse, Austin; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Bull and Ram, New York; David Castillo, Miami and Participant Inc., New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

Samara Golden (b. Michigan, 1973) received her MFA from Columbia University and has exhibited at MoMA PS1 in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); Sculpture Center, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; CANADA, New York; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm; and Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, among others. Golden was featured in the 2014 Hammer Museum Biennial, Made in L.A., and her work is in the permanent collections of L.A. MOCA and the Zabludowicz Collection. In 2015, a monograph on Golden was published by MoMA/PS1. A solo exhibition of her work, Samara Golden: A Trap in Soft Division, will remain on display at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in spring of 2016. She is based in Los Angeles.

Yve Laris Cohen is an artist whose work incorporates visual art and dance practices and often deals with the body as medium. Laris Cohen frequently utilizes sculptural and architectural elements in his performances and draws upon classical ballet. “Laris Cohen’s performances and attendant installations consider the material conditions by which bodies and objects are created or destabilized, legitimated or devalued… Laris Cohen performatively explores the nature of subjectivity—asking how we come to assume our bodies and by what means they are maintained.” (Jenny Jaskey, Mousse Magazine)

Laris Cohen has performed his works in many New York City venues, including Waltz, at Thomas Erben Gallery (2012); Untitled, created with Park McArthur, at SculptureCenter (2012); Coda, also at SculptureCenter (2012); Seth, at The Kitchen (2013); Landing Field: Vito Acconci and Yve Laris Cohen, at Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2013); D.S., as part of the 2014 Whitney Biennial; D.C., exhibited at Murray Guy (2014); Platform and Patron, at PLATFORM 2015: Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, Danspace Project (2015); and Fine, at The Kitchen (2015).

Laris Cohen’s work has also been presented and commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop, Company Gallery, Abrons Arts Center, Recess, Movement Research at the Judson Church, in New York; The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; and Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Laris Cohen was an Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research (2010-2012) and has received an Emerging Artist Grant from The Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2011), an FCA Emergency Grant for his Whitney Biennial performance (2014), and a grant from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art (2015).

Laris Cohen graduated with a B.A. in Dance & Performance Studies/Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, and earned an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2011. In 2014 he was a Guest Instructor at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts Department of Performance Studies, and from 2015-2016 he was a Visiting Artist at Cooper Union. He currently advises for Dance and Process at The Kitchen. Laris Cohen was a Point Scholar as an undergraduate and is now Point Foundation Mentor, which is a scholarship-granting organization for LGBTQ students.

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.

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