Yearly Archives: 2013

Sanford Biggers was born in Los Angeles in 1970. Influenced by a two-year stay in Nagoya, Japan, and by a multitude of cross-cultural references, Biggers’ installations incorporate the study of ethnological objects, popular culture and icons, and Dadaist strategies. His work cross-pollinates different disciplines and philosophies, bringing them together in the course of his explorations and studies. Biggers also includes performative elements into his work, creating layers of reading that act as anecdotal vignettes. Sanford Biggers has exhibited internationally since 2000; he has participated in many important exhibitions including Freestyle and Black Belt at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Performa 07, and Illuminations at the Tate Modern in London (2007).

Official Bio

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/41293785#[/vimeo]

QC #11

textiles and fabric treated oil stick and spray paint on archival paper

48″ x 42″, 2013

Quilt #27

Fabric Treated Acrylic, Spray Paint, Cotton On Repurposed Quilt

48″ x 91″, 2013

Float

mixed media

29″h x 16.5″w x 18″d, 2013

Constellation II

Steel, Plexiglass, LED’s, Zoopoxy, cotton quilt, original printed cotton tile

dimensions variable, 2009

The Bridge is Over (biddybyebye)

mixed media

24″ x 41″, 2006

Bomb Magazine Interview

Okayplayer Interview

Instagram

Ashley Bickerton was born in the West Indies in 1959. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts, graduating in 1982, and continued his education in the Whitney Museum Independent Studies Program in New York, where he continued to live and work until 1993. Since then, Bickerton has taken up full-time residence on the island of Bali where he continues to work. Bickerton has exhibited worldwide, and his works are included in many museum and public art collections. Solo exhibitions include ‘Recent Wurg’, White Cube (2009), Singapore Tyler Print Institute (2006). He has participated in many major group exhibitions including Oceanomania: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas at the Nouveau Musée de Monaco, Monaco, France (2011), Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate Modern, London (2009), ‘The Incomplete’, Chelsea Art Museum, ‘Fractured Figure: Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection’, Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece (2007) and the East Village USA retrospective, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2004). Bickerton was a seminal figure in the East Village scene in New York and one of the original members of the group of artists that came to be known as “Neo-Geo.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmp3OWeAS7I[/youtube]

White Head I

acrylic, digital print and plastic laminate on wood

93″ x 80″ x 7″, 2012

ANWWLB 2

acrylic and digital print and insect pins on paper

46.75″ x 50.75″ x 5″, 2011

 The Five Sages

acrylic, pencil, and photography

48″ x 96″, 1998

Links:

Contemporary Art Daily

artnet interview

In Frame TV 

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/57562188[/vimeo]

Jon Kessler was born in Yonkers, New York in 1957.  In 1980 he graduated S.U.N.Y. Purchase and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Studio Program.  Jon’s first exhibition was at Artist’s Space in 1983.  That same year he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, again in 1985, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996.  Since that time he has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and Asia.  His works are in many public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and MOCA.  His most recent show, “The Web”, was at the Swiss Institute in New York this past spring.  Jon is a Professor of the Visual Arts at Columbia University where he has taught since 1994.

“The Blue Period”

“The Palace at 4 AM”

“The Web”

Links:

Vice

Gizmodo

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/56059698[/vimeo]

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/56059700[/vimeo]

William Pope.L (born 1955 in New Jersey) is an acclaimed and prolific interdisciplinary artist, and is the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA fellowships, and the USA Fellowship in Visual Arts. He has shown his work at The Project in New York and Los Angeles, and was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.  Pope.L is a visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries and has created multi-disciplinary work since the 1970’s. He is perhaps best known for his provocative performances, such as ATM Piece, and his decades-long series of crawls across New York City, commemorated in eRacism, a retrospective which showed at several prominent museums and galleries. The Black Factory, his most recent project, toured the East Coast and the Midwest. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

William Pope.L’s Black Factory at Philadelphia’s Bartram’s Gardens

Links:

Bad At Sports

Bomb Magazine

Interview Magazine

Tompkins Square Park Crawl:

http://vimeo.com/21785641

Leslie Hewitt’s photographs rest in sturdy wooden frames that lean against the wall and invite viewers to experience a unique space between photography and sculpture. Her work combines still life compositions comprised of political, social, and personal materials, which result in multiple histories seen embedded in sculptural, architectural, and abstract forms. Mundane objects and structures open into complex systems of knowledge. This perceptual slippage is what attracts Hewitt to both the illusions of film (still and moving photography) and the undeniable presence of physical objects (sculpture). Exploring this as an artist and not as a historiographer, Hewitt draws parallels between the formal appearance of things and their significance to collective history and political consciousness in contemporary art. In her lecture, Hewitt will discuss the development of her practice and recent collaborations.

Leslie Hewitt is an artist living in New York City. She graduated from The Cooper Union’s School of Art in 2000 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 2004. From 2001-2003, she studied Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University. Hewitt has displayed her work in exhibitions in a number of American and international galleries, and her work is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art; Guggenheim Museum; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, the Yale Art Gallery, among others. Hewitt was represented in MoMA’s New Photography 2009, a thematic presentation of significant recent work in photography that examines and expands the conventional definitions of the medium. In 2010, she received the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant and Joyce Alexander Wein Prize. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others.

More information can be found here:

Leslie Hewitt

Leslie Hewitt artforum.com / 500 words 

Leslie Hewitt – Sikkema Jenkins

Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous.

Emin’s work has an immediacy and often sexually provocative attitude that firmly locates her oeuvre within the tradition of feminist discourse. By re-appropriating conventional handicraft techniques – or ‘women’s work’ – for radical intentions, Emin’s work resonates with the feminist tenets of the ‘personal as political’. In Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, Emin used the process of appliqué to inscribe the names of lovers, friends and family within a small tent, into which the viewer had to crawl inside, becoming both voyeur and confidante. Her interest in the work of Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele particularly inform Emin’s paintings, monoprints and drawings, which explore complex personal states and ideas of self-representation through manifestly expressionist styles and themes.

Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963, and studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. She has exhibited extensively internationally including solo and group exhibitions in Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia and America. In 2007 Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale, was made a Royal Academician and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Kent and Doctor of Philosophy from London Metropolitan University. During the Edinburgh Festival in 2008, Emin’s survey exhibition ’20 Years’ opened at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and then toured on to Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain and the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (March 19th – June 21st 2009). In May 2011, Emin had a major solo exhibition at the Hayward, London. Emin currently lives and works in London.

More information can be found here:

Love Is What You Want

Tracey Emin Studio

Tracey Emin Hearts Times Square

Mary Reid Kelley was born in South Carolina in 1979. She studied Art and Women’s Studies at St. Olaf College and received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2009. The videos she makes in collaboration with her husband, artist Patrick Kelley, have been shown in New York, Los Angeles, and London. Other exhibitions include The Wexner Center for the Arts (2012); Bard CCS (2012), MACRO Rome (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2010); and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010). Mary and Patrick completed a commissioned video for the 2010 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, The Dissolve. In August 2013 the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston will present an exhibition of the video work.

An interest in language, literature and history informs their work, which combines video, poetry, animation, performance, and painting. The videos have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, and Art in America. The making of The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011) was documented in Season Six of Art21, episode “History”. From 2011 to 2012 Mary and Patrick resided at the American Academy in Rome, and now live in upstate New York.

More information can be found here:

http://maryreidkelley.com/

Art 21: Mary Reid Kelley: “You Make Me Iliad” 

Finding the Reason in Mary Reid Kelley’s Mad Rhymes About French History

Filmmaker, theorist, and author Hito Steyerl examines pop culture, social issues, and gender politics through the moving image. Her work is highly self-referential; Steyerl is adamant that one must understand his or her own role in social issues before exploring such topics artistically. As a result, she is often featured in many of her works. Drawing inspiration from her dual heritage, Steyerl is greatly influenced by both German and Japanese avant-garde film. In addition to solo exhibitions throughout Europe, Steyerl’s work has been included in numerous art shows including the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2004), Manifesta 5 (2004), dOCUMENTA (12) (2007) and the Shanghai Biennale (2008), among others.  Recent solo exhibitions include Hito Steyerl, e-flux, New York, 2011 and focus: Hito Steyerl, The Art Institute Chicago, 2012−2013.  A collection of her essays is recently published in The Wretched of the Screen (2012).  Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy, currently serves as a professor for media arts at the University of Arts Berlin and has taught film theory at both Goldsmith College and Bard College.

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

More information can be found here:

Making: Hito Steyerl [Is the musem a battlefield?] at the 2012 Creative Time Summit (video)

NYTimes: Memorials, Along With Some Mischief Hito Steyerl Has New York Solo Debut at e-flux (2012)

Frieze Magazine: Hito Steyerl at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, Germany (2009)

A native of Nairobi, Kenya, Wangechi Mutu received her MFA degree from Yale University in 2000 and her BFA at Cooper Union College, New York. She has a solo exhibition currently on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and will have a solo show opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia this coming May. Mutu recently participated in the Kochi-Muziris Biennial, the first in India, as well as the Paris Triennial: Intense Proximity, curated by Okwui Enwezor, and will be included in the International Center of Photography’s Triennial this May and the Moscow Bienniale this Fall. She has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Miami Art Museum; and ArtPace, San Antonio. Mutu’s work is in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

More information can be found here:

Gladstone Gallery

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey

Susanne Vielmetter

Art21 Blog

The Art Newspaper

Carroll Dunham is an American artist born in 1949. Dunham has had numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally, including: Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany; Millesgarden in Stockholm, Sweden; Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA; Drammens Museum in Norway; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York launched a major retrospective of his work in 2002. Dunham received the Skowhegan Medal for Distinction in Painting in 2004. The artist currently lives and works in New York City and rural Connecticut. 

More information can be found here:

Carroll Dunham Website

Gladstone Gallery

New York Times Review: Carroll Dunham at Gladstone Gallery

Los Angeles Times Review: Carroll Dunham at Blum & Poe

Los Angeles Times Review: “Carroll Dunham: A Drawing Survey”