Yearly Archives: 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 (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

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).

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York City. He was born in Santiago de Chile.

Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitechapel, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. A major retrospective of his work took place in summer 2012 at three institutions in Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V. and Alte Nationalgalerie. In 2014 the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki hosted the most extensive retrospective of his career.

Jaar has realized more than sixty public interventions around the world. More than fifty monographic publications have been published about his work.

He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000.

His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York, the MCA in Chicago, MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles, the Tate in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlaebeck and dozens of other institutions and private collections worldwide.

More information here

Leigh Ledare (born 1976, Seattle, Washington) uses photography, archival material, text and film to explore human agency, social relationships, taboos and the photographic in equal turns. Through a wide span of artistic practices, Ledare examines issues related to desire, identity, and morality.

Ledare first gained recognition through his exhibition and artist book titled “Pretend You’re Actually Alive” (2000-2008), which examines the complex relations between the artist and his mother – namely, how she used intimacy, eroticism, and vulnerability to negotiate the balance of power within the family. The resulting images are often sumptuous, saturated with color, and surprisingly beautiful. But they also, and importantly, disconcert the viewer, making us uncomfortable, and, in the process, raising questions about the functioning of the image and the construction of subjectivity in contemporary culture. Ledare has continued this examination into personal relationships with works that’s feature images of his collectors, patrons, and ex-wife, often in sexual situations.

In 2009, Ledare was included in an exhibition “Ça Me Touche” curated by Nan Goldin in Arles France as part of the annual Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. Writing in the New York Times, Roberta Smith said that Ledare is “taking us deep into the darkness and torment that drive many artists.” In the series “Personal Commissions” Ledare “answered personal ads from women whose desires echoed those of his mother’s, and paid them to photograph him in their apartments, in a scenario of their choosing.”

Read more about his controversial body of work “Pretend You’re Actually Alive” here.